FESE  MANY  YEARS 


EANDER  MATTHEWS 


LIBRARY     ] 

NlV-  .;SITY  Of 
CALIFORNIA 
ANTACRUZ      I 


"Books  by  Grander  Matthews 

These  Many  Years,  Recollections  of  a 
New  Yorker 


BIOGRAPHIES 
Shakspere  as  a  Playwright 
Moliere,  His  Life  and  His  Works 

ESSAYS  AND  CRITICISMS 
French  Dramatists  of  the  iQth  Century 
Pen  and  Ink,  Essays  on  subjects  of  more 

or  less  importance 

Aspects  of  Fiction,  and  other  Essays 
The  Historical  Novel,  and  other  Essays 
Parts  of  Speech,  Essays  on  English 
The  Development  of  the  Drama 
Inquiries  and  Opinions 
The  American  of  the  Future,  and  other 

Essays 

Gateways  to  Literature,  and  other  Essays 
On  Acting 
A  Book  About  the  Theater 


THESE   MANY   YEARS 


THESE  MANY  YEARS 

RECOLLECTIONS  OF  A  NEW  YORKER 


BY 

BRANDER   MATTHEWS 

OF  DRAMATIC   LITERATURE   IN   COLUMBIA    UNIVERSITY 

MEMBER   OF 
TUB   AMERICAN   ACADEMY   Of  ARTS  AND  LETTERS 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 
1917 


COPYRIGHT,  1917,  BY 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Published  October,  1917 


PS 
2373 


IN   MEMORIAM 

EDWARD   MATTHEWS 
1814-1887 

VIRGINIA   BRANDER  MATTHEWS 
1827-1903 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAQr 

I.  THE  POINT  OF  VIEW 1 

II.  THE  PARENTAGE  OF  A  NEW  YORKER      ...  18 

III.  EARLY  SCHOOL-DAYS 35 

IV.  LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS 54 

V.  PREPARING  FOR  COLLEGE 81 

VI.  UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS 101 

VII.  ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW      ....  133 

VIII.  NEW  YORK  IN  THE  EARLY  SEVENTIES    .     .     .  158 

IX.  PARISIAN  MEMORIES     .      ....      .      .     .  183 

X.  CONCERNING  CLUBS      .     .     ,     .     .     .     .     .  214 

XI.  CRITICISM  AND  FICTION 242 

XII.  EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES.    I 258 

XIII.  EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES.     II 286 

XIV.  ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING 318 

XV.  AMONG  THE  PLAYERS 345 

XVI.  ADVENTURES  IN  STORY-TELLING 374 

XVII.  A  PROFESSOR  OF  DRAMATIC  LITERATURE     .     .  391 

XVIII.  LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES 414 

XIX.  A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT 438 

\ 


vii 


THESE   MANY   YEARS 


THESE   MANY  YEARS 

CHAPTER  I 
THE  POINT  OF  VIEW 


"\  "IT  THEN  a  man  squares  himself  at  his  desk 
^  V  and  for  a  moment  stays  his  hand  from 
the  pen  while  he  tries  to  "squeeze  the 
sponge  of  memory"  —  to  borrow  the  apt  phrase  of 
Henry  James  —  when  he  seeks  to  recall  and  to  set  in 
order  his  most  salient  recollections,  he  finds  him- 
self confronted  by  the  duty  of  making  a  choice 
between  the  two  kinds  of  autobiography,  loosely 
so  called.  He  must  decide  whether  he  will  write 
mainly  about  himself,  bringing  up  to  date  the  log 
of  his  own  lonely  voyage  thru  life,  or  whether 
he  will  not  talk  mainly  about  others,  about  his 
fellow-passengers  on  that  Noah's  Ark  whereon  we 
are  all  of  us  embarked  as  it  drifts  over  the  endless 
waters.  If  he  shall  choose  rather  to  recall  what  he 
remembers  about  others  than  what  he  remembers 
about  himself,  the  result  will  be  only  a  book  of  remi- 
niscences and  not  a  true  autobiography.  And  a 
book  of  reminiscences,  however  valuable  it  may  be, 
is  necessarily  less  valuable  than  a  true  autobiog- 


2  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

raphy,  since  a  man  can  know  other  men  only  from 
the  outside,  whereas  he  ought  to  know  himself 
from  the  inside. 

Not  only  is  the  true  autobiography  likely  to  have 
solider  qualities  than  the  book  of  reminiscences,  it 
ought  also  to  be  more  amusing  for  its  maker;  it  ought 
to  be  more  fun  for  him  (and  therefore  to  have  more 
flavor  for  those  who  may  read  it),  because  altho 
we  may  like  to  gossip  about  others  we  dearly  love 
to  chatter  about  ourselves.  In  fact,  the  only  two 
occasions  when  a  man  has  the  privilege  of  amply 
expressing  himself,  and  of  telling  what  he  thinks  and 
feels,  are  when  he  summons  the  family  physician  to 
listen  to  his  self-scrutiny  and  when  he  solicits  the 
gentle  reader  to  assume  the  same  attitude.  A  bore 
has  been  defined  as  a  man  who  wants  to  talk  about 
himself  when  you  want  to  talk  about  yourself. 
Yet  even  by  this  condemnatory  definition  the  auto- 
biographer  escapes,  for  when  the  gentle  reader  set- 
tles himself  under  the  evening  lamp  and  before  the 
wood-fire  with  a  book  in  his  hand,  he  does  not  then 
desire  to  talk  about  himself,  whatever  may  be  his 
wishes  at  other  moments.  What  the  gentle  reader 
demands  is  that  the  autobiographer  shall  so  talk 
about  himself  as  to  make  his  interest  in  his  personal 
theme  more  or  less  contagious  —  that  he  shall  some- 
how and  in  some  measure  transmit  to  others  the 
pleasure  he  finds  in  his  gossip  about  himself.  "Truly, 
I  think,"  so  the  candid  Sir  Walter  Scott  made  one 
of  his  characters  confess,  "writing  history  (one's 
self  being  the  subject)  is  at  any  time  as  amusing 
as  reading  that  of  foreign  countries." 


THE  POINT  OF  VIEW  3 

The  autobiographer  may  be  at  fault  in  thinking 
that  he  can  carry  over  to  the  reader  any  part  of  the 
delight  he  has  taken  in  his  selfish  task;  and  he  may 
even  err  in  thinking  that  there  is  any  call  for  the 
telling  of  his  life.  Yet  even  the  most  insignificant 
and  unworthy  of  autobiographers  is  after  all  a 
human  being;  and  the  life  of  any  human  being  has 
its  worth  and  its  significance.  The  superiority  of 
autobiography  over  every  other  form  of  biography 
has  been  asserted  by  two  American  authors,  neither 
of  whom  oddly  enough  left  behind  him  his  own 
account  of  his  own  career.  Longfellow,  in  one  of 
his  note-books,  asserted  playfully  that  "autobiog- 
raphy is  what  biography  ought  to  be";  and  Holmes, 
in  one  of  his  essays,  declared  that  "there  are  but 
two  biographers  who  can  tell  the  story  of  a  man's 
or  a  woman's  life.  One  is  the  person  himself  or 
herself;  the  other  is  the  Recording  Angel.  The 
autobiographer  cannot  be  trusted  to  tell  the  whole 
truth,  tho  he  may  tell  nothing  but  the  truth;  and 
the  Recording  Angel  never  lets  his  book  out  of  his 
own  hands." 

The  whole  truth  the  autobiographer  cannot  tell  for 
many  reasons,  partly  because  it  is  given  to  no  man 
to  know  the  whole  truth  —  especially  about  him- 
self. His  personal  equation  prevents  him  from  tak- 
ing an  absolutely  accurate  observation  of  his  own 
deeds  and  of  his  own  moods.  The  whole  truth  he 
cannot  hope  to  tell;  and  perhaps  his  ambition  to 
tell  nothing  but  the  truth  is  as  futile.  To  do  this 
may  be  his  sole  ambition,  yet  it  is  unattainable 
by  human  infirmity.  However  honest  a  man  may 


4  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

be  and  however  little  of  romanticism  he  may  have 
in  him,  he  cannot  help  poetizing  his  own  part,  mix- 
ing fancy  with  his  facts,  Dichtung  with  Wahrheit. 
The  sponge  of  memory,  even  when  pressed  by 
clean  hands,  can  rarely  give  us  the  pure  water  of 
truth,  for  the  stream  that  drips  from  it  must  be 
more  or  less  muddied  by  our  likes  and  dislikes,  ear- 
lier and  later.  If  we  cannot  rely  on  our  observation 
of  life,  how  can  we  put  confidence  in  our  memories  ? 
The  physiologists  tell  us  that  a  man  is  made  over 
at  least  once  in  seven  years;  and  how  shall  a  man 
made  over  again  and  again  be  trusted  to  recapture 
from  one  of  his  vanished  selves  the  fleeting  feelings 
of  that  departed  entity? 

"Memory  is  never  purely  passive,  and  therefore 
never  absolutely  faithful,"  we  were  told  by  Jules 
Lemaitre,  that  most  suggestive  of  French  critics, 
always  alert  to  the  world  at  large,  even  when  he  was 
playfully  centering  his  immediate  attention  on  the 
passing  shows  presented  in  the  minor  theaters  of 
Paris.  "Its  activity  is  constant  and  not  to  be 
coerced.  At  bottom  memory  is  not  to  be  distin- 
guished —  except  chronologically  —  from  imagina- 
tion, to  which  it  furnishes  materials,  but  materials 
already  rehandled  and  altered.  Never  do  we  re- 
member things  exactly.  Always  what  we  are,  what 
we  feel  at  the  present  moment,  modifies  in  our  own 
eyes  what  we  felt  and  what  we  were  in  the  past." 

This  is  uncontrovertible;  and  it  is  a  warning  to 
be  heeded  by  the  wary  autobiographer.  Strive  as 
he  may,  he  will  err;  and  he  will  do  well  to  recognize 
frankly  in  advance  the  pitiful  fact  that  the  picture 


THE  POINT  OF  VIEW  5 

of  life  he  is  about  to  present  cannot  avoid  a  resem- 
blance more  or  less  close  to  the  absurd  reflections 
of  those  convex  or  concave  mirrors  which  distort 
the  faces  and  the  figures  of  grinning  rustics  in  the 
side-show  of  the  circus.  And  the  more  clearly  this 
warning  rings  in  the  ear  of  the  autobiographer,  and 
the  more  often  it  checks  the  momentum  of  his  self- 
confidence,  the  more  likely  is  he  to  attain  to  that 
approximate  verity  which  is  the  utmost  he  can 
hope  to  achieve.  He  can  find  a  second  warning 
in  a  saying  of  Mark  Twain's,  when  approaching 
threescore  years  and  ten:  "When  I  was  younger  I 
could  remember  anything  whether  it  happened  or 
not  —  but  now  I'm  getting  old,  and  soon  I  shall  re- 
member only  the  latter."  More  than  once  as  I 
have  evoked  the  past  in  preparation  for  these  pages, 
I  have  recalled  events  at  which  I  have  fondly  be- 
lieved myself  to  have  been  a  spectator,  only  to  dis- 
cover that  I  was  deluding  myself  by  remembering 
what  had  not  happened;  and  I  can  only  hope  that 
I  may  make  this  discovery  as  often  as  I  may  be  in 
danger  of  deluding  the  reader. 

II 

It  was,  I  think,  in  the  first  year  of  the  twentieth 
century  that  a  student  in  the  Columbia  Law  School, 
who  was  taking  a  course  of  mine  on  the  develop- 
ment of  modern  fiction,  asked  me  to  read  a  short- 
story  of  his;  and  when  he  came  back  for  my  criti- 
cism I  told  him  that  it  was  a  good  enough  tale,  and 
that  it  seemed  to  show  his  possession  of  the  gift  of 


6  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

narrative,  but  that  it  lacked  the  flavor  of  individu- 
ality, since  it  contained  nothing  to  differentiate  it 
sharply  from  other  good-enough  tales. 

"What  do  you  know,"  I  asked,  "that  nobody 
else  knows?  —  or  at  least  that  nobody  else  has 
written  about?  Every  one  of  us  has  had  experi- 
ences denied  to  the  rest  of  his  fellow  men;  and  this 
is  the  stuff  out  of  which  he  can  create  literature  with 
the  most  likelihood  of  its  interesting  the  rest  of  us. 
What  have  you  yourself  seen  that  might  be  unhack- 
neyed material  or  atmosphere  or  background  for 
fiction?" 

"I  know  the  lumber  camps  of  Michigan,"  was  his 
prompt  answer. 

"Is  the  life  out  there  interesting?"  I  inquired. 

"Very  interesting,"  he  responded. 

"Well,  then,"  I  went  on,  "if  you  have  found  it 
interesting,  so  may  your  readers.  Why  not  write 
about  that?"  So  it  was  that  a  few  months  later 
Mr.  Stewart  Edward  White  sent  me  the  'Blazed 
Trail.' 

And  now  when  I  seek  to  record  my  own  retro- 
spections I  must,  perforce,  put  my  own  question 
to  myself.  What  have  I  to  tell?  What  have  I 
seen  that  others  have  not  seen?  What  special  ex- 
periences have  I  had  to  lend  the  flavor  of  individu- 
ality to  these  recollections  of  a  man  of  letters? 
Even  if  the  panorama  of  life,  as  it  has  unrolled  it- 
self before  my  gaze  for  more  than  threescore  years, 
has  keenly  interested  me,  what  reason  have  I  to 
suppose  that  my  report  of  it  will  have  any  attrac- 
tion for  gentle  readers?  Probably,  like  any  other 


THE   POINT  OF  VIEW  7 

man  talking  to  himself,  I  am  not  insistent  upon  a 
convincing  answer  to  these  questions.  Yet  if  I 
must  respond  to  my  own  interrogatories,  I  can  only 
declare,  first,  that  I  have  been  singularly  fortunate 
in  my  friends  and  acquaintance,  since  I  have  known 
more  or  less  intimately  many  men  who  were  very 
well  worth  knowing.  Second,  I  should  add  that  I 
have  chanced  to  be  present  on  more  than  one  occa- 
sion when  things  happened  —  things  of  a  certain 
historic  interest.  Thirdly,  and  finally,  I  should 
allege  that  the  angle  from  which  I  surveyed  these 
things  and  these  men  was  all  my  own,  since  it  is 
very  unlikely  that  any  other  person  who  may  have 
known  these  men  and  seen  these  things  regarded 
them  from  the  point  of  view  personal  to  me. 

This  personal  point  of  view  was  the  result  of  my 
training  for  an  unusual  profession;  and  what  made 
my  position  the  more  peculiar  was  that  I  was  never 
permitted  to  practise  this  profession  for  which  I 
had  been  prepared,  whereas  most  of  those  who  have 
practised  it  do  so  without  the  preparation  I  had 
received  to  qualify  me  to  exercise  it.  This  pro- 
fession was  that  of  millionaire,  a  calling  less  thickly 
populated  half  a  century  ago  than  it  is  now.  For 
this  profession  I  was  deliberately  educated  by  my 
father,  who  was  frank  in  informing  me  in  my  youth 
that  when  I  grew  up  I  should  not  have  to  earn  my 
own  living.  It  was  to  be  my  task  in  life  not  to 
make  money,  but  to  administer  an  ample  fortune, 
and  to  spend  it  as  it  ought  to  be  spent,  for  my  own 
advantage  and  for  public  service.  My  father  had 
made  the  money  for  me,  his  only  son,  and  there 


8  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

would  be  an  abundance  of  it;  and  the  wherewithal 
being  thus  provided,  it  was  for  me  to  fulfil  the  large 
but  dimly  envisaged  ambitions  he  had  formed  for 
me.  Altho  he  never  clearly  stated  his  hopes,  I 
think  that  they  turned  in  the  direction  of  politics, 
and  that  he  foresaw  my  entrance  into  public  life, 
very  much  as  tho  I  were  an  elder  son,  heir  of  an 
ancestral  estate  in  Great  Britain,  whose  place  in 
Parliament  was  duly  awaiting  his  majority. 

To  be  a  millionaire  as  my  father  conceived  it  for 
me  was  to  practise  one  of  the  learned  professions, 
as  necessary  to  the  state  as  any  one  of  its  older 
brethren,  medicine  or  the  law  or  the  church.  Altho 
my  father  in  those  days  of  my  youth  was  immersed 
in  affairs,  busily  engaged  in  accumulating  wealth 
for  my  future  use,  money  itself  was  very  rarely  a 
topic  of  conversation  in  our  family  circle.  As  we 
had  it,  there  was  no  need  to  talk  about  it;  and  it 
was  taken  as  a  matter  of  course.  Only  when  we 
ceased  to  have  it  did  it  begin  to  bulk  bigger  in  our 
thoughts  and  in  our  converse.  As  a  result  of  this 
reticence,  at  the  time  when  my  father  intimated  to 
me  his  expectations  for  my  future,  money  did  not 
have  any  mysterious  attraction  for  me.  The  pro- 
fession which  my  father  had  chosen  for  me  seemed 
to  me  not  unlike  any  other;  and  I  scarcely  sus- 
pected that  it  was  that  one  which  the  immense 
majority  of  men  would  most  gladly  embrace.  What- 
ever might  be  in  my  boyhood  my  personal  opinion 
of  my  destined  profession,  I  never  had  a  chance  to 
practise  it,  for  my  father's  fortune  began  to  fade 
away  in  the  very  year  when  I  came  of  age,  and  it 


THE  POINT  OF  VIEW  9 

vanished  finally  a  decade  before  my  father  died, 
leaving  for  the  family  needs  only  the  far  more  mod- 
est inheritance  of  my  mother. 

Altho  our  change  of  circumstances  had  many  dis- 
pleasing accompaniments,  and  altho  it  forced  me  to 
face  the  world  for  myself,  in  a  fashion  that  I  had 
never  foreseen,  I  believe  I  can  honestly  say  that  I 
have  never  unduly  bewailed  the  loss  of  the  wealth 
I  was  to  have  inherited.  It  was  with  ultimate  equa- 
nimity that  I  relinquished  any  hope  of  entering  the 
profession  for  which  I  had  been  trained.  And  of 
late  I  have  found  myself  wondering  at  times  whether 
I  should  have  been  any  happier  or  any  richer  in  the 
things  that  are  worth  while  had  I  come  into  the  for- 
tune which  had  once  been  my  father's.  At  last  I 
have  become  more  and  more  inclined  to  the  conclu- 
sion that,  on  the  whole,  I  have  been  better  off  with- 
out it.  It  is  true  that  I  might  have  administered  it 
well  and  that  I  might  have  risen  to  place  and  power 
in  politics;  but  it  is  even  more  probable  that  I 
might  not  have  been  able  to  withstand  the  insidious 
temptations  and  the  disintegrating  accompaniments 
of  wealth  not  earned  by  my  own  efforts. 

I  have  also  wondered  frequently  whether  it  was 
an  advantage  or  a  disadvantage  for  me  to  have 
spent  my  boyhood  in  luxurious  surroundings,  when 
the  wealth  that  supplied  them  was  to  shrivel  away 
just  as  I  was  about  to  appreciate  its  possibilities. 
To  have  had  in  abundance  and  then  not  to  have, 
this  is  a  deprivation  of  accustomed  things;  and  for 
years  it  made  itself  felt  in  a  constant  sense  of  loss. 
Many  a  poor  boy  has  had  a  hard  struggle  in  his 


10  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

bare  youth,  battling  almost  for  life  itself,  and  has 
toiled  unceasingly,  striving  upward  until  he  has 
won  a  large  fortune  for  his  old  age;  and  I  have  often 
asked  myself  whether  his  experience  is  more  satis- 
factory on  the  whole  than  mine.  I  had  at  least  the 
privilege  of  early  initiation,  of  association  from  my 
youth  up  with  the  well-bred,  of  living  in  a  home  of 
graceful  refinement,  of  profiting  by  foreign  travel  in 
childhood  and  boyhood,  of  meeting  interesting  peo- 
ple, authors  and  artists,  of  having  every  opportunity 
for  surveying  the  world  in  its  pleasantest  aspects. 
And  perhaps  I  owe  to  this  some  part,  at  least,  of 
my  incurable  cheerfulness,  of  my  tolerant  good 
humor,  and  of  my  indurated  optimism. 

These  things  have  each  of  them  their  own  value; 
and  taken  together  they  may  be  called  a  fair  com- 
pensation for  other  things  which  I  have  had  to  sur- 
render. But  no  one  of  them,  nor  all  of  them  to- 
gether, can  I  deem  as  important  as  another  benefit 
for  which  I  am  more  and  more  grateful  as  the  years 
go  by.  Wealth,  merely  as  wealth,  as  money  heaped 
up,  as  a  source  of  luxury  and  of  self-indulgence,  has 
never  had  for  me  any  glamor.  Of  course,  it  would 
be  inept  not  to  conceive  of  money  as  a  good  thing 
to  have;  but  it  never  appeared  to  me  as  other 
than  one  of  the  many  good  things  that  fate  may  or 
may  not  have  bestowed  upon  any  one  of  us.  A 
great  fortune,  or  what  was  so  accounted  half  a  cen- 
tury ago,  had  been  a  possession  of  mine,  at  least  in 
immediate  expectation;  and  all  unthinking  I  had 
enjoyed  the  benefit  of  it.  In  consequence,  I  have 
never  been  awed  by  wealth,  or  even  greatly  im- 


THE  POINT  OF  VIEW  11 

pressed  by  it,  having  no  temptation  to  worship  it 
inordinately,  even  if  I  retain  a  full  understanding 
of  its  value  as  a  lubricant  for  the  machinery  of  life. 

Ill 

A  few  years  ago,  half-a-dozen  or  half-a-score,  up 
in  the  sunny  smoking-room  only  recently  built  on 
the  roof  of  the  Athenaeum  in  London,  and  on  a 
lovely  summer  afternoon,  I  had  an  illuminating  con- 
versation that  comes  back  to  me  now  as  I  write. 
That  keen  explorer  of  nature  and  art  and  life,  Sir 
Martin  Conway,  in  the  course  of  our  wandering 
talk  about  men  and  things,  was  unexpectedly  moved 
to  develop  what  struck  me  at  first  as  only  a  clever 
but  abhorrent  paradox,  until  his  clear  exposition  at 
last  almost  carried  conviction.  His  startling  con- 
tention was  that  the  ultimate  strength  of  Great 
Britain,  her  march  forward  in  peace  and  in  war, 
her  unparalleled  ability  to  administer  a  stupendous 
empire,  her  unexampled  power  of  ruling  alien  de- 
pendencies, in  fact,  all  her  acknowledged  superiori- 
ties, were  the  direct  result  of  a  single  principle,  a 
principle  which  the  British  alone  among  their  Euro- 
pean rivals  had  preserved,  and  which  we  Americans 
had  never  allowed  to  be  established.  This  was  the 
principle  of  primogeniture,  by  which  the  great  es- 
tates passed  entire  to  the  eldest  son,  cutting  off  the 
younger  sons  to  fend  for  themselves. 

As  Conway  proceeded  to  expound  this  unaccepta- 
ble theory,  I  slowly  realized  the  force  of  the  French 
wit's  assertion  that  "a  paradox  is  often  only  a  truth 


12  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

serving  its  apprenticeship."  He  began  by  admitting 
the  apparent  unfairness  of  refusing  their  equal  share 
to  the  younger  sons,  but  he  maintained  that  this 
unfairness  was  but  apparent,  since  it  deprived  them 
only  of  money  while  giving  them  what  was  far 
better  than  money.  He  insisted  that  they  actually 
had  the  best  of  it,  since  what  is  really  best  for  any 
man  is  not  that  he  should  have  his  path  made 
smooth  for  him  by  the  enervating  inheritance  of 
unearned  wealth,  but  that  he  should  receive  the 
rich  training  which  would  fit  him  most  adequately 
for  making  his  own  way  in  the  world  when  he  is 
finally  cast  on  his  own  resources;  that  he  should 
know  from  the  first  the  necessity  he  will  be  under  to 
fend  for  himself,  so  that  he  will  at  the  start  have 
every  incentive  to  profit  by  his  ample  educational 
opportunities;  and  then  finally  that  he  should  be 
forced  "to  fight  for  his  own  hand,"  assured  in  ad- 
vance of  the  influential  support  of  the  head  of  the 
family,  the  elder  son  who  is  the  only  one  of  the  lot 
to  be  laden  with  the  heavy  responsibility  of  keeping 
up  appearances,  and  who  is  the  only  one  to  be  cursed 
with  unearned  wealth. 

Conway  pointed  out  that  this  assured  to  the 
younger  sons  the  "career  open  to  the  talents," 
which  the  French  Revolution  proclaimed,  open  in 
England  not  to  all  the  talents  as  the  French  had 
demanded,  but  only  to  a  strictly  selected  group, 
limited  to  the  class  which  had  been  proved  to  pos- 
sess a  hereditary  gift  for  leadership.  My  brilliant 
friend  had  no  difficulty  in  adducing  a  host  of  illus- 
trations, including,  of  course,  the  most  obvious  and 


THE  POINT  OF  VIEW  13 

the  most  illustrious  —  Wellington.  As  he  devel- 
oped his  paradox  it  began  slowly  to  take  on  the  at- 
tributes of  an  unrecognized  truth,  incomplete  in  its 
application,  no  doubt,  but  demanding  considera- 
tion. And  I  could  not  refrain  from  silently  making 
a  personal  application  to  myself.  I  was  not  a 
younger  son;  in  fact,  I  was  an  only  son;  yet  I  had 
had  every  educational  opportunity,  even  if  I  had  not 
improved  these  as  amply  as  the  younger  sons  in 
England  who  had  gone  forth  to  win  fame  and  for- 
tune for  themselves.  That  I  had  not  profited  as 
wisely  or  as  fully  as  I  might  by  my  earlier  advan- 
tages, was  perhaps  because  I  had  not  the  warning 
they  received  almost  in  the  cradle  that  the  luxury 
which  surrounded  and  supported  them,  and  supplied 
the  preparation  for  self-advancement  was  never  to 
be  theirs. 


IV 

Altho  I  do  not  now  feel  any  keen  disappointment 
at  my  failure  to  come  into  the  fortune  my  father 
hoped  to  bequeath  to  me,  and  altho  I  believe  my- 
self to  be  amply  reconciled  to  the  state  of  life  in 
which  I  find  myself  to-day,  I  am  forced  to  confess 
to  a  disappointment  of  a  totally  different  kind,  due 
to  my  failure  to  attain  what  was  a  very  early  object 
of  ambition.  In  spite  of  my  placid  expectation 
of  wealth,  what  I  most  vigorously  desired  in  my 
youth  was  not  the  leisure  and  the  luxury,  or  even 
the  position  in  public  life  wherein  my  father  placed 
me  in  his  forecasting  aspirations.  Indeed,  I  doubt 


14  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

if  I  ever  adequately  appreciated  the  possibilities  of 
the  career  planned  for  me,  or  if  that  career  really 
appealed  to  me,  forever  dangling  itself  before  me  as 
a  prize  to  be  won  by  hard  labor.  To  politics  I  felt 
little  attraction,  even  when  I  chanced  to  give  it  a 
thought;  but  I  did  not  often  let  my  mind  play  with 
it,  since  public  life  seemed  to  me  far  in  the  future, 
and  in  a  way  unreal.  It  had  no  power  to  excite  me, 
ignorant  as  I  was  of  its  allurements. 

What  had  the  power  to  excite  me  was  the  theater; 
and  its  allurements  were  immediate  and  genuine. 
I  did  not  want  to  act;  I  wanted  to  write  plays  for 
others  to  act.  That  was  the  goal  where  my  wander- 
ing thoughts  tended  to  direct  themselves  when  I 
was  an  undergraduate  and  a  law  student.  I  made 
no  effort  to  reconcile  this  wish  for  the  practice  of 
stage-craft  with  the  possession  of  wealth;  indeed,  I 
do  not  believe  that  I  ever  got  so  far  as  to  consider 
play-writing  as  a  profession,  or  to  weigh  its  pecuniary 
rewards;  I  simply  wanted  to  write  plays,  for  the 
sheer  delight  of  writing  them,  without  thought  of 
fortune  or  fame,  and  without  being  conscious  of 
any  pent-up  emotions  within  me  demanding  expres- 
sion in  dialog  and  in  action.  I  had  no  surging 
sentiments;  I  did  not  need  money;  and  as  for 
winning  a  reputation  by  my  work  for  the  stage, 
that  —  to  the  best  of  my  recollection  —  simply 
never  entered  my  head.  I  wanted  to  write  plays 
for  the  joy  of  the  job  itself,  wholly  without  any 
ulterior  consideration. 

In  a  letter  written  when  he  was  eighteen,  Long- 
fellow told  his  father  that  he  most  eagerly  aspired 


THE  POINT  OF  VIEW  15 

after  future  eminence  in  literature;  "my  whole  soul 
burns  ardently  for  it,  and  every  earthly  thought 
centers  in  it."  I  had  no  such  soaring  ambition,  and 
none  of  the  proud  consciousness  of  power  which 
must  have  moved  Longfellow  to  this  warm  expres- 
sion of  his  youthful  hope.  What  I  obeyed  was  ap- 
parently an  inborn  impulse,  the  result  of  my  having 
been  taken  to  the  theater  not  infrequently  in  my 
childhood,  and  of  having  gone  there  often  in  my 
boyhood.  It  was  before  I  was  eighteen  that  I 
made  my  first  attempt,  as  impossible  and  as  empty 
as  a  boy's  first  attempts  at  play-writing  usually  are. 
And  before  I  was  twenty  a  bald  and  hasty  adapta- 
tion of  a  French  farce  was  actually  produced  by 
real  actors  in  a  real  theater  before  a  real  audience. 
This  took  place  in  a  Southwestern  city,  and  I  did 
not  have  the  excruciating  pleasure  of  being  present 
at  the  ordeal  by  fire.  The  piece  was  given  on  the 
benefit  night  of  the  chief  performer;  and  then  it 
sank  forever  out  of  sight,  raising  no  ripple  on  the 
surface  of  the  river  of  oblivion. 

In  the  forty  years  that  followed  I  have  written 
other  plays,  either  alone  or  in  collaboration,  original 
and  not  taken  from  the  French.  At  least  half-a- 
dozen  of  these,  some  in  one  act  only,  and  the  others 
stretching  out  to  the  larger  framework  of  three  and 
four  acts,  have  been  exposed  to  the  public  gaze; 
and  two  or  three  of  them  have  been  found  to  pos- 
sess the  power  of  pleasing  the  assembled  playgoers. 
I  have  never  been  the  happy  author  of  what  may  be 
termed  a  "best  seller"  of  the  stage,  one  of  these 
triumphant  spectacles,  displayed  for  half  a  thousand 


16  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

nights  on  Broadway,  with  half-a-dozen  subsidiary 
companies  exploiting  it  simultaneously  from  Port- 
land, Maine,  to  Portland,  Oregon,  and  with  foreign 
countries  still  to  be  heard  from.  This  prolonged 
pleasure  has  never  been  mine;  and  yet  my  average 
of  success  on  the  stage  has  not  been  unsatisfactory. 

What  is  unsatisfactory  that  the  sum  total  from 
which  this  average  must  be  struck  is  not  larger 
than  it  is,  and  that  I  have  not  oftener  presented  my- 
self before  the  footlights,  that  I  have  not  had  plays 
produced  season  after  season,  to  sink  or  to  swim, 
as  the  winds  of  chance  might  blow.  So  keen  is  my 
enjoyment  in  the  inventing,  the  constructing,  and 
in  the  writing  of  a  play  that  I  can  face  with  tran- 
quillity the  deep  damnation  of  its  taking  off.  I 
should  not  have  complained  had  I  had  more  than 
my  fair  share  of  failures,  finding  full  compensation 
in  the  survivors  from  the  wreck.  The  craft  of  play- 
making,  with  all  its  arduous  secrets,  and  all  its  ob- 
scure processes,  is  to  me  so  fascinating  that  I  can 
sympathize  with  the  remark  of  a  fellow  enthusiast 
of  a  wider  experience  than  mine,  to  the  effect  that 
the  next  best  thing  to  seeing  a  play  of  his  succeed 
was  to  see  it  fail.  I  suppose  that  my  sympathy 
with  this  saying  evidences  in  me  the  survival  of  the 
gambling  instinct,  of  the  eagerness  to  throw  dice 
with  fate  —  for  assuredly  there  is  no  aleatory  ex- 
citement, short  of  actual  warfare,  so  poignant  as 
that  inherent  in  the  first  performance  of  a  new  play 
before  a  metropolitan  audience. 

To  write  plays,  and  to  keep  on  writing  them, 
and  to  have  them  performed,  one  after  another, 


THE  POINT  OF  VIEW  17 

year  after  year  —  this  was  my  boyhood  ambition ; 
and  to  my  constant  disappointment  this  ambition 
has  been  incompletely  gratified.  I  think  I  can  spy 
out  the  reasons  for  this;  the  foremost  of  them  is  that 
in  spite  of  my  love  for  the  dramaturgic  art,  I  never 
abandoned  myself  to  it  whole-heartedly  —  perhaps 
because  the  vocation  was  not  so  clear,  the  call  not 
so  loud,  as  I  liked  to  believe.  The  drama  is  a  most 
jealous  mistress,  and  I  have  failed  to  serve  her  with 
unwavering  fidelity.  This  is  why  I  have  been  for 
a  score  of  years  or  more  engaged  in  expounding  by 
word  of  mouth  or  on  the  printed  page,  the  principles 
of  the  art  of  play-making  rather  than  in  putting 
them  into  practice  for  my  own  account. 

Here  is  another  profession  for  which  I  was  care- 
fully prepared,  this  time  by  my  own  act,  and  by 
years  of  devoted  study;  and  this  other  profession 
I  have  been  permitted  to  practise  only  intermit- 
tently. It  would  not  be  easy  for  me  to  decide 
which  of  my  two  professions,  the  one  abandoned 
almost  as  soon  as  I  came  of  age,  and  the  other  cher- 
ished unceasingly  but  never  exclusively  pursued, 
has  had  the  more  obvious  influence  upon  the  varied 
events  of  my  life.  What  it  is  easy  for  me  to  point 
out  is  that  when  I  was  forty  I  was  suddenly  and 
most  unexpectedly  invited  to  enter  a  third  pro- 
fession —  that  of  teaching  —  to  which  I  had  never 
given  a  thought,  and  for  which  I  had  made  no  con- 
scious preparation. 


CHAPTER  II 
THE  PARENTAGE  OF  A  NEW  YORKER 


'  y^V  NE  cannot  gather  some  of  the  best  fruits 
1  of  life  without  climbing  out  to  the  end  of 

^^  the  slender  branches  of  the  Ego,"  said 
Holmes  in  one  of  his  essays;  and  I  cite  this  as  an 
excuse  for  the  inevitable  prevalence  of  the  perpen- 
dicular pronoun  in  these  rambling  reminiscences.  I 
am  the  seventh  in  descent  from  James  Matthews, 
who  came  over  to  Massachusetts  between  1630  and 
1636,  in  which  latter  year  he  was  living  in  Charles- 
town.  In  1639,  or  soon  thereafter,  he  removed  to 
Yarmouth  on  Cape  Cod,  where  he  was  to  die  in 
January,  1685-6,  after  having  been  selectman  of 
the  town  for  many  years.  In  1664  he  was  represen- 
tative in  the  colonial  legislature.  A  doubtful  tra- 
dition recorded  that  he  was  a  man  of  "liberal  edu- 
cation"; and  this  is  likely  enough,  as  there  were  in 
the  seventeenth  century  more  college-bred  men  in 
New  England  in  proportion  to  the  population  than 
there  ever  have  been  since. 

Altho  the  proof  is  inadequate,  it  seems  probable 
also  that  he  was  a  member  of  the  Glamorganshire 
family  of  Matthews,  which  had  close  relations  with 
Bristol,  whence  so  many  of  the  earlier  immigrants 
departed  to  New  England.  It  may  be  noted  that 

18 


PARENTAGE   OF  A   NEW  YORKER     19 

the  ship  in  which  John  Cabot  had  sailed  from  that 
port  in  1497,  on  the  voyage  which  resulted  in  the 
discovery  of  the  mainland,  was  named  either  the 
Matthew,  after  the  evangelist,  or  the  Matthews,  after 
some  local  patron  —  who  may  have  been,  so  I  like 
to  fancy,  a  far  distant  ancestor  of  mine.  There  is 
one  piece  of  evidence  which  may  connect  the  James 
Matthews  who  came  to  New  England  before  1636 
with  an  English  family  of  the  name.  A  will  is  pre- 
served in  Gloucester,  England,  dated  1650,  in  which 
Margery  Matthews  of  Tewksbury,  single  woman, 
left  forty  pounds  to  her  "kinsman,  James  Matthews, 
now  beyond  the  seas,  if  he  return  for  it."  As  James, 
the  kinsman  of  Margery,  did  not  return  to  claim 
this  legacy,  it  is  quite  possible  that  he  was  the  James 
Matthews  who  died  at  Yarmouth,  thirty  odd  years 
after  the  date  of  this  will. 

Wherever  the  vaguely  glimpsed  ascendants  of 
James  Matthews  may  have  dwelt,  his  descendants 
clung  to  the  sandy  soil  of  Cape  Cod  for  five  genera- 
tions. Sometimes  they  married  the  daughters  of 
their  Barnstable  County  neighbors,  and  sometimes 
they  sought  wives  as  far  afield  as  Boston.  On  the 
distaff  side  my  father  could  claim  descent  from 
William  Brewster,  the  elder  who  led  the  Pilgrims  on 
the  voyage  to  New  England,  and  also  from  Thomas 
Prince,  twice  governor  of  Plymouth  Colony.  Two 
other  of  his  ascendants  in  the  female  line  also  de- 
mand mention  here;  one  is  Colonel  John  Gorham, 
who  commanded  one  of  the  two  Plymouth  companies 
at  the  Narragansett  fight,  in  December,  1675,  and 
who  died  of  fever  while  on  service  in  King  Philip's 


20  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

War  the  year  after;  and  the  other  is  the  elder 
Thomas  Dexter,  the  original  purchaser  of  Nahant, 
which  he  bought  for  a  suit  of  clothes  from  an  In- 
dian (who  was  the  first  person  to  be  hanged  in  the 
colony).  Brewster  and  Prince,  Gorham  and  Dexter 
—  these  are  good  New  England  names;  and  it  is 
pleasant  for  me  to  know  that  my  grandson,  if  he 
so  choose,  can  easily  establish  his  right  of  election 
to  the  Society  of  the  Mayflower  Descendants  and 
to  the  Society  of  Colonial  Wars. 

Like  the  rest  of  the  dwellers  on  the  New  England 
coast,  the  men  of  the  Matthews  family  were  some 
of  them  farmers,  and  some  of  them  sailors;  and  on 
occasion  they  plowed  both  the  land  and  the  sea. 
There  is  a  family  tradition,  told  to  me  in  my  boy- 
hood, that  one  of  our  kin,  whether  by  blood  or  by 
marriage  I  do  not  now  recall,  was  in  command  of  a 
wooden  paddle-wheel  boat  in  the  early  days  of  steam- 
navigation  across  the  Atlantic.  The  vessel  came  to 
grief  in  the  ice  off  the  Banks;  and  the  captain, 
standing  on  the  paddle-box  with  the  first  officer, 
saw  all  the  passengers  and  all  the  crew  safely  into 
the  boats.  Then  he  did  his  duty  and  went  down 
with  his  ship.  But  in  the  final  plunge  of  the  stricken 
vessel,  the  paddle-box  was  wrenched  free;  and  by 
clinging  to  it  the  captain  and  his  companion  were 
saved,  to  be  picked  up  the  next  day  by  the  boats 
of  a  rescuing  ship. 


PARENTAGE  OF  A  NEW  YORKER 


II 

My  grandfather,  born  in  1779  and  surviving  until 
1857,  was  named  James,  as  had  been  his  grand- 
father, the  grandson  of  the  James  Matthews  who 
was  the  first  of  our  family  to  come  to  these  shores. 
Only  once  did  I  see  my  grandfather,  on  a  solitary 
visit  to  Cape  Cod  in  my  early  childhood;  and  what 
my  memory  now  yields  under  pressure  is  only  a 
faded  portrait  of  a  kindly  old  man  with  strong 
features,  and  a  blurred  picture  of  his  weather-beaten 
house,  wherein  the  object  that  most  impressed  it- 
self was  a  huge  fly-trap,  with  an  ingenious  revolving 
device  for  luring  its  frequent  victims  into  the  fatal 
interior.  I  remember  a  long,  hot  ride  along  sandy 
roads  under  sparse  pines  until  we  came  to  a  little 
camp-meeting,  hidden  away  in  the  woods.  I  can 
recapture  also  a  view  of  the  immense  cranberry- 
marshes,  stretching  out  flat  on  both  sides  of  the 
road ;  and  I  have  a  vision  of  the  vast  salt-vats  where 
the  sea-water  was  slowly  evaporating  under  the 
midsummer  sun. 

From  what  my  father  told  me  at  one  time  or  an- 
other, I  gather  that  my  grandfather  was  a  fore- 
handed man,  "capable"  as  the  New  Englander 
terms  it,  and  of  a  type  not  uncommon  in  the  little 
towns  a  century  ago  —  a  man  who  in  a  larger  com- 
munity would  have  had  a  fuller  incentive  to  put  forth 
all  his  power.  From  the  fact  that  he  was  regularly 
chosen  moderator  of  town -meeting,  I  judge  that  he 
had  the  respect  of  his  fellow  townsmen;  and  from 


22  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

another  fact  I  infer  that  he  was  not  always  tolerant 
of  the  weaknesses  of  his  neighbors.  He  managed 
the  town-meetings  so  firmly  and  he  cut  short  pro- 
lix discussion  so  ruthlessly  that  he  was  thought  by 
some  to  be  a  little  too  arbitrary;  and  as  a  result 
the  discontented  organized  secretly,  and  were  able 
to  elect  another  moderator,  more  likely  to  be  lenient 
to  their  prolixity.  But  that  summer  town -meeting 
lasted  three  days,  and  in  haying-time,  too;  so  that 
the  next  year  James  Matthews  became  moderator 
again  without  any  opposition. 

One  other  peculiarity  of  his  I  cannot  omit,  if  only 
because  of  the  inverted  moral  it  carries.  My  grand- 
father had  the  old  Gape  Cod  habit,  perhaps  brought 
home  from  his  seafaring  days,  of  indulging  every 
evening  in  a  goblet  of  Medford  rum,  properly  diluted 
with  water;  and  it  was  the  cherished  right  of  his 
three  sons,  when  they  were  in  their  teens,  to  claim 
each  in  his  turn  the  solitary  lump  of  sugar  that  was 
left  at  the  bottom  of  the  glass.  At  the  risk  of  sadly 
disappointing  the  natural  expectation  of  any  tee- 
totallers who  may  chance  to  read  these  records,  I 
am  bound  to  state  that  this  early  taste  of  liquor 
at  a  most  susceptible  age  did  not  later  lead  any 
one  of  his  sons  to  delight  in  strong  drink.  I  can 
testify  that  my  father,  at  least,  was  one  of  the  most 
abstemious  men  I  have  ever  known;  and  even  in 
his  old  age,  when  he  was  ordered  to  take  stimu- 
lants, his  doses  were  infrequent  and  almost  infini- 
tesimal. 


PARENTAGE   OF  A  NEW  YORKER     23 


III 

In  Yarmouth  in  1814  my  father,  Edward  Mat- 
thews, was  born;  and  he  was  the  first  of  our  stock 
to  abandon  Cape  Cod.  He  did  a  man's  work  on 
his  father's  farm  long  before  he  was  sixteen;  long 
before  he  was  twenty  he  moved  to  Boston  in  search 
of  a  larger  field  for  his  untiring  energy.  A  few  years 
later  he  went  West;  and  he  used  to  tell  me  that  he 
supposed  he  was  one  of  the  first  white  men  to  go 
under  the  Falls  of  St.  Anthony.  At  St.  Louis  and 
New  Orleans,  up  and  down  the  Mississippi,  and 
along  its  chief  tributaries,  he  pushed  his  fortune, 
shrewdly  foreseeing  the  movement  of  prices.  He 
was  an  operator  in  cotton,  in  breadstuffs,  and  in 
provisions,  never  hesitating  to  extend  his  purchases 
beyond  the  daring  of  his  rivals,  but  never  "specu- 
lating," as  he  always  insisted  to  me.  That  is  to 
say,  he  was  never  tempted  into  that  taking  of 
chances  which  is  purely  gambling,  ready  as  he 
always  was  to  run  any  risk,  when  his  imaginative 
insight  into  world -politics  and  into  trade-conditions 
revealed  to  him  that  the  hour  had  come  when  cour- 
age would  reap  its  full  reward. 

More  often  than  not  his  vision  was  sound,  but  it 
was  not  infallible;  and  while  he  generally  made 
money,  now  and  again  he  lost.  Altho  he  liked  to 
have  ample  means  to  spend  on  his  family  and  on 
others,  he  did  not  greatly  care  for  money  itself, 
his  real  pleasure  arising  rather  from  the  making  of 
it,  from  beholding  the  tangible  result  of  his  bold 


24  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

enterprise.  He  was  a  true  descendant  of  the  mer- 
chant adventurers  of  Tudor  England;  and  there  was 
an  Elizabethan  spaciousness  in  his  outlook  upon 
opportunity.  The  son  of  one  of  his  earliest  friends 
declared  that  his  grandiose  audacity  in  his  gigantic 
operations  made  him  appear  "a  kind  of  a  hero  of 
commerce,  especially  when  one  remembers  the  time 
when  these  were  made  —  before  any  large  fortunes 
had  been  accumulated,  before  Wall  Street  was, 
before  inflation  had  popularized  speculation." 

When  he  sat  to  Bonnat  in  Paris  a  few  years  be- 
fore his  death,  in  1887,  he  was  weakened  by  pa- 
tiently endured  pain;  and  perhaps  for  this  reason 
the  portrait  has  a  spiritual  quality  not  common  in 
the  paintings  of  this  artist.  None  the  less  has  it  all 
his  customary  vigor  and  directness.  While  at  work 
upon  it,  Bonnat  remarked  to  my  sister  that  her 
father  had  striking  and  significant  features,  so  that 
he  was  eminently  paintable:  "In  fact,  he  has  a  head 
like  those  that  Titian  used  to  paint."  The  most 
obvious  explanation  of  this  shrewd  saying  may  be 
found  in  the  fact  that  Titian  was  wont  to  portray 
the  patricians  of  Venice,  a  city  whose  merchants 
were  princes,  and  whose  princes  were  merchants. 
Never  at  any  time  could  my  father  be  mistaken  for 
other  than  an  American,  yet  he  conformed  to  the 
type  of  merchant  endowed  with  a  far-reaching 
imagination  as  this  existed  in  Italy. 

On  Cape  Cod  at  the  end  of  the  second  decade  of 
the  nineteenth  century,  even  the  most  ambitious  of 
boys  had  scant  schooling;  and  my  father  could 
profit  only  by  a  few  short  winter  terms.  It  was 


PARENTAGE  OF  A  NEW  YORKER     25 

always  a  wonder  to  me  how  he  had  acquired  his 
knowledge  of  books.  Pope  and  Byron  were  early 
favorites,  from  whom  he  used  to  quote  occasionally. 
Of  the  later  writers,  he  was  attracted  to  Thackeray 
and  to  Taine.  He  had  an  instinctive  liking  for  the 
best,  and  an  almost  intuitive  power  for  its  percep- 
tion —  accompanied  naturally  enough  by  a  keen 
dislike  for  the  second-rate.  It  was  rather  by  travel 
than  by  reading  that  he  cultivated  his  taste  for 
beauty;  and  he  came  in  time  to  have  a  singular 
delicacy  of  appreciation  in  judging  enamels  and 
laces  and  paintings.  He  was,  in  short,  one  of  those 
very  unusual  men  whose  natural  gifts  are  so  gener- 
ous that  they  can  attain  to  culture  without  the 
customary  foundation  of  a  liberal  education. 

Probably  because  he  did  not  resolutely  set  him- 
self to  the  task  he  never  acquired  any  foreign  lan- 
guage, not  even  French;  yet  he  had  an  unusual 
ability  to  make  himself  understood  in  whatever 
country  he  might  chance  to  be.  Indeed,  he  used 
to  say  that  he  had  travelled  very  comfortably  all 
over  Europe,  or  at  least  in  France  and  Italy  and 
Germany,  with  the  aid  of  the  single  word  "Com- 
bien?" — an  apt  illustration  of  the  truth  of  the 
American  saying  that  "money  talks." 

But  my  father  understood  the  universal  language 
of  art;  and  he  was  in  advance  of  his  time  in  his 
enjoyment  of  Japanese  bronzes,  for  example,  and  of 
the  exquisite  work  of  the  contemporary  French 
goldsmiths  who  had  resuscitated  and  rivalled  the 
craftsmanship  of  Benvenuto  Cellini.  He  had  an 
almost  feminine  delicacy  of  taste,  and  he  had  it  in 


26  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

a  degree  rarely  achieved  by  any  woman,  since  it  is 
noteworthy  that  altho  men  are  far  less  likely  to  be 
dowered  with  this  gift  than  women,  when  they  do 
possess  it  they  have  it  more  abundantly  and  more 
certainly.  In  Italy  in  1867  my  father  was  keenly 
interested  in  Castellani's  reproduction  of  Etruscan 
ornaments;  and  it  was  to  him  that  the  artist-anti- 
quary once  made  the  suggestive  remark  that  he  had 
in  his  shops  not  a  few  workmen  who  could  improve 
on  the  handicraft  of  Cellini,  altho  not  one  of  them 
could  be  counted  on  to  make  an  original  design  of 
any  vital  value.  Into  his  purchases  of  these  ob- 
jects of  art  and  also  of  paintings,  my  father  carried 
all  the  sagacity  which  had  characterized  his  money- 
making.  When  he  finally  lost  his  fortune,  after  the 
panic  of  1873,  he  had  to  dispose  of  most  of  the 
treasures  collected  during  the  preceding  decade; 
and  he  found  some  slight  consolation  for  this  part- 
ing from  things  he  had  lovingly  gathered  in  the 
fact  that  he  was  able  to  sell  them  for  more  than  they 
had  cost  him. 

When  the  Civil  War  broke  out  my  father  was  too 
broken  in  health  to  volunteer,  and  he  had  to  content 
himself  with  sending  a  substitute.  As  a  New 
Englander  who  had  lived  long  in  New  Orleans,  he 
had  no  illusions  as  to  the  early  end  of  the  struggle. 
He  knew  the  temper  of  the  North  and  of  the  South; 
and  he  foresaw  that  the  strife  would  be  long- 
protracted.  Therefore  he  began  at  once  to  buy 
cotton,  and  he  persevered  in  this  enterprise  all  thru 
the  four  years  of  incessant  fighting.  With  the  aid 
of  an  unnaturalized  British  subject  whom  he  sup- 


PARENTAGE  OF  A  NEW  YORKER     27 

plied  with  funds,  and  who  kept  for  the  most  part 
within  the  steadily  shrinking  Confederate  lines,  he 
managed  to  get  out  many  thousand  bales  that  might 
otherwise  have  been  destroyed.  His  earliest  pur- 
chases cost  him  only  seven  or  eight  cents  a  pound; 
and  his  latest  sales  realized  nearly  two  dollars  a 
pound.  His  judgment  as  to  the  exact  moment 
when  it  was  wise  to  withdraw  from  an  operation 
was  not  always  as  sound  as  his  instinct  as  to  the 
minute  when  this  operation  should  begin;  but  in 
the  Civil  War  he  perceived  when  the  end  was  at  hand; 
and  he  withdrew  from  the  cotton  market  long  be- 
fore it  broke. 

One  incident  of  this  series  of  operations  in  cotton 
during  the  war  deserves  to  be  dwelt  on,  as  illustra- 
tive of  the  disfavor  with  which  the  Union  cause 
was  regarded  in  England,  and  more  particularly  in 
Liverpool,  which  had  been  hard  hit  by  the  interrup- 
tion of  trade  relations.  When  the  Trent  affair 
occurred,  my  father  had  more  than  one  cargo  of 
cotton  on  the  Atlantic  on  its  way  to  the  Lancashire 
spinners  who  were  eagerly  awaiting  it;  and  in  the 
uncertainty  as  to  the  outcome  of  the  strained  rela- 
tions between  Great  Britain  and  the  United  States, 
he  thought  it  wise  to  take  the  first  steamer  to  Eng- 
land, that  he  might  defend  his  property  in  person. 
He  spent  several  lonely  and  wearisome  weeks  of 
waiting  at  the  Adelphi  Hotel  in  Liverpool,  a  port 
then  apparently  populated  solely  by  Southern 
sympathizers.  As  a  result  of  this  intensity  of  feel- 
ing my  father  was  cut  in  the  street  by  men  who 
had  sat  at  his  table  in  New  Orleans  only  a  few  years 


28  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

before.  And  on  more  than  one  occasion  certain  of 
these  men  went  into  the  coffee-room  of  the  Adelphi 
while  my  father  was  taking  a  solitary  meal,  and, 
dividing  into  two  groups,  they  sat  themselves  down 
at  tables  right  and  left  of  him,  so  that  they  might 
loudly  talk  across,  violently  expressing  their  dislike 
for  all  Yankees. 

My  father  had  early  become  a  firm  believer  in 
the  future  of  New  York.  He  had  moved  here  be- 
fore the  war,  and  had  bought  a  house.  Before  the 
effects  of  the  inflation  which  resulted  from  the 
superabundant  issue  of  the  greenbacks  needed  to 
carry  on  the  gigantic  struggle  had  manifested  them- 
selves by  a  rise  in  prices,  he  began  to  invest  the 
profits  of  his  cotton  operations  in  real  estate  in  the 
immediate  vicinity  of  the  Stock  Exchange.  He 
altered  a  host  of  old  houses  into  commodious 
offices  to  shelter  the  feverish  speculators  of  the  Gold 
Room,  and  of  the  later  petroleum  boom.  The 
Empire  Building,  at  the  corner  of  Broadway  and 
Rector  Street,  was  the  first  office  edifice  to  be 
equipped  with  an  elevator.  He  was  as  far-sighted 
and  as  courageous  in  his  real-estate  purchases  in 
New  York  as  he  had  been  in  his  earlier  operations 
in  other  parts  of  the  country.  In  1873  his  rent- 
roll  was  more  than  half  a  million  dollars.  Unfor- 
tunately he  had  made  the  error  of  heavily  mort- 
gaging these  profitable  properties,  which  were  rising 
in  value  year  by  year,  in  order  to  obtain  control  of 
an  uncompleted  railroad  in  North  Carolina.  And 
it  was  not  long  after  the  panic  that  he  found  him- 
self forced  to  part  with  all  his  deeply  encumbered 


PARENTAGE  OF  A  NEW  YORKER     29 

real  estate  in  the  vain  hope  of  saving  his  prepon- 
derant interest  in  an  unprofitable  road. 


IV 

It  was  while  he  was  residing  in  the  South  that  my 
father  met  my  mother,  Virginia  Brander,  the  second 
daughter  of  James  S.  Brander.  This  maternal 
grandfather  of  mine  had  been  born  in  1792  near 
Elgin,  in  the  northwestern  part  of  Scotland;  and  he 
arrived  in  the  United  States  at  the  end  of  the  first 
decade  of  the  last  century.  Altho,  like  my  father 
in  New  England,  my  grandfather  could  have  had 
in  Scotland  little  opportunity  for  schooling,  he  had, 
like  my  father  again,  the  sturdy  resolution  and  the 
unflagging  energy  by  which  the  Scots  and  the  New 
Englanders  of  a  century  ago  were  nerved  to  over- 
come the  disadvantages  of  an  unduly  shortened 
education.  When  I  knew  him  in  the  later  years 
of  his  life,  he  was  a  man  of  combined  dignity  and 
charm,  kindly  and  shrewd,  holding  his  own  easily 
in  any  society  in  which  he  might  be  placed.  In 
different  towns  of  the  United  States,  at  first  in  Peters- 
burg, then  in  New  York,  and  later  in  New  Orleans, 
he  had  early  proved  that  he  had  a  full  share  of  the 
business  acumen  characteristic  of  the  hardy  Scots 
who  came  to  this  country  to  push  their  fortunes. 
He  revealed  also  his  possession  of  the  solidity  of 
character  which  wins  the  respect  even  of  rivals  in 
trade,  and  which  is  ever  more  important  than  the 
faculty  of  making  money. 

He  was  the  owner  of  the  earliest  line  of  packets 


30  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

to  sail  for  Europe  from  any  of  our  ports  south  of 
Mason  and  Dixon's  line.  His  mercantile  activity 
stretched  from  the  War  of  1812  to  the  Civil  War, 
just  before  the  outbreak  of  which  he  retired  from 
business  with  what  was  then  considered  a  com- 
fortable fortune.  I  have  reason  to  believe  that  I 
was  his  favorite  grandchild;  and  when  I  was  only 
a  little  boy,  scarcely  out  of  the  nursery,  he  called 
after  me  a  ship  he  was  having  built.  He  even 
ordered  that  the  gilded  figurehead  of  this  vessel 
should  be  carved  in  my  effigy.  As  I  never  saw  the 
Young  Brander  I  cannot  testify  to  the  accuracy  of 
the  resplendent  image.  Nor  do  I  know  into  whose 
hands  the  ship  passed  after  my  grandfather  parted 
with  it;  but  I  believe  that  its  career  was  untimely 
cut  off,  and  that  it  was  one  of  the  ships  captured 
and  sunk  by  the  Alabama  during  her  bloodless 
cruises. 

It  was  while  he  was  living  in  Petersburg  that 
my  grandfather  married  my  grandmother,  Harriet 
McGraw  of  Chesterfield  County,  Virginia.  There 
were  three  sons  of  this  marriage  and  two  daughters, 
my  mother  being  the  youngest  of  the  five  children. 
Like  many  another  Scot  who  had  become  an  Ameri- 
can by  choice,  my  grandfather  was  loyal  both  to  his 
native  land  and  to  his  adopted  country;  and  as  a 
testimony  of  this  double  devotion  he  bestowed  the 
name  of  "Caledonia"  upon  his  elder  daughter, 
and  he  was  about  to  inflict  that  of  "Columbia" 
upon  the  younger,  when  he  relented  in  favor  of 
" Virginia"  —  a  recognition  of  States'  rights  for 
which  my  mother  was  ever  after  profoundly  grateful. 


PARENTAGE   OF  A  NEW  YORKER     31 

In  the  privacy  of  the  domestic  circle  the  harsh 
and  forbidding  name  of  the  elder  sister  was  speedily 
softened,  and  I  recall  her  as  "Aunt  Doney."  She 
married  an  Englishman,  and  when  as  a  bride  she 
entered  the  home  of  her  husband's  parents  near 
Liverpool,  his  aged  nurse,  who  had  hidden  behind 
the  door  to  see  what  manner  of  woman  this  Ameri- 
can might  be  whom  the  son  of  the  house  had  taken 
to  wife,  broke  out  with  the  astonished  cry:  "Why, 
she's  white!"  To  this  day  it  is  impossible  even  to 
guess  what  color  the  old  servant  expected  an  Ameri- 
can bride  to  be,  whether  red  or  black.  My  aunt's 
marriage,  it  may  be  noted,  had  taken  place  in  the 
years  between  1840  and  1850,  and  therefore  after 
the  publication  of  the  earliest  'Leatherstocking 
Tales,'  and  before  the  publication  of  'Uncle  Tom's 
Cabin.' 

With  a  canny  Scot's  high  regard  for  education, 
my  grandfather  saw  to  it  that  his  daughters  should 
have  the  advantages  denied  to  him.  My  mother 
had  been  born  in  1827,  and  her  sister  was  only  a 
year  older.  By  good  fortune  they  were  early  sent 
to  Miss  McClenahan's  school  in  New  York.  We 
are  carelessly  inclined  to  believe  that  our  educa- 
tional practices  are  far  more  advanced  now  in  the 
first  quarter  of  the  twentieth  century  than  they 
could  have  been  in  the  second  quarter  of  the  nine- 
teenth century,  and  I  confess  that  it  is  improbable 
that  there  were  in  the  United  States  in  1840  many 
schools  for  girls  so  admirably  conducted  as  that  to 
which  my  mother  and  my  aunt  owed  their  unusual 
training.  Miss  McClenahan's  methods  may  have 


32  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

been  old-fashioned  if  judged  by  up-to-date  stand- 
ards; but  she  did  somehow  manage  to  train  the 
girls  committed  to  her  charge,  and  to  train  them 
with  conscientious  thoroness. 

As  a  result  of  this  schooling,  I  recall  my  mother 
as  the  best-educated  woman  I  have  ever  known. 
She  knew  what  she  knew  with  absolute  certainty; 
and  she  was  modestly  aware  of  the  boundaries  of 
her  knowledge.  Her  memory  was  marvellously 
comprehensive  and  accurate;  apparently  she  never 
forgot  anything  that  was  worth  remembering.  And 
her  education  had  not  stopped  with  the  end  of  her 
school-days,  when  she  was  only  sixteen.  Her  am- 
bition had  been  widely  awakened,  and  she  was  in- 
cessant in  improving  herself  almost  as  long  as  she 
lived,  taking  an  unflagging  interest  in  the  progress 
of  the  world,  even  when  she  had  long  passed  three- 
score years  and  ten. 

At  Miss  McClenahan's  school  my  mother  was  not 
only  solidly  grounded  in  the  essentials  of  education, 
she  had  also  an  ample  opportunity  to  acquire  the 
accomplishments,  music  and  foreign  languages  — 
the  accomplishments  which  are  only  too  often  ac- 
cepted as  feminine  substitutes  for  the  essentials. 
Her  French  was  fluent  and  accurate ;  and  her  Italian 
teacher  was  that  Lorenzo  da  Ponte  who  had  in  his 
youth  supplied  the  libretto  for  Mozart's  'Don  Gio- 
vanni.' In  history,  and  also  I  think  in  English,  the 
chief  instructor  for  the  older  girls  was  John  Bigelow; 
and  my  mother  used  to  tell  us  how  handsome  he 
was  as  a  young  man,  and  how  distinguished  his 
manner  —  and  also  how  the  schoolgirls  all  admired 


PARENTAGE  OF  A  NEW  YORKER     33 

him,  and  how  some  of  them  sighed  for  him  in  se- 
cret. 

I  do  not  wish  to  suggest  that  my  mother  was  a 
woman  of  unusual  intellectual  power.  She  was 
quick-witted  and  clear-minded,  a  good  talker  and 
an  excellent  listener.  She  was  not  in  the  least  aus- 
tere in  her  outlook  on  life,  and  on  occasion,  in  the 
privacy  of  the  family  circle,  she  could  be  a  most  amus- 
ing mimic.  She  was  the  ultimate  embodiment  of 
feminine  refinement  and  of  womanly  delicacy,  and 
in  consequence  of  this  she  was  a  little  too  shrink- 
ing, or  perhaps  it  would  be  juster  to  say,  a  little  too 
lacking  in  any  forthputting  energy,  ever  to  seize  a 
commanding  position  in  society.  Altho  she  was 
hospitable,  she  never  took  the  first  step  toward  new 
friendships,  and  she  was  disinclined  ever  to  pay  a 
first  call.  A  most  gracious  and  winning  hostess  in 
her  own  home,  she  had,  whenever  she  went  without 
its  walls,  what  may  fairly  be  termed  a  grand  man- 
ner, native  to  her  and  not  tainted  by  any  trace  of 
affectation.  Indeed,  affectation  or  pretense  of  any 
kind  was  wholly  foreign  to  her  nature.  Her  por- 
trait was  painted  by  Cabanel  when  she  was  already 
elderly,  but  as  is  the  custom  of  Parisian  artists, 
he  translated  her  into  French,  and  presented  her 
as  a  somewhat  sophisticated  countrywoman  of  his 
own.  This  is  why  I  much  prefer  a  simpler  and 
earlier  portrait  in  my  possession,  due  to  the  brush 
of  Buchanan  Read  (to  whose  pen  we  owe  'Sheridan's 
Ride5)  — a  portrait  which  bestows  on  her  the  slop- 
ing shoulders  fashionable  in  the  fifties,  but  which 
also  captures  not  a  little  of  her  gracious  dignity. 


34  THESE  MANY  YEARS 


We  none  of  us  order  our  lives  to  best  advantage, 
and  as  we  look  back  at  our  careers  we  cannot  but 
blush  at  the  blunders  we  have  committed.  Yet  as 
I  turn  my  gaze  to  the  past,  and  as  I  bring  before  my 
eyes  again  the  figures  most  familiar  to  me  in  my 
childhood,  it  seems  to  me  that  in  one  respect  at 
least  I  made  no  mistake.  I  did  not  err  in  what  is 
perhaps  the  most  momentous  act  of  life,  the  most 
far-reaching  in  its  inevitable  and  inexorable  conse- 
quences —  in  the  choice  of  my  parents  and  of  my 
grandparents.  However  much  I  may  be  dissatis- 
fied with  myself,  with  them  at  least  I  am  com- 
pletely contented. 


CHAPTER  III 
EARLY  SCHOOL-DAYS 


A  YEAR  or  two  earlier  than  1850  my  father, 
in  the  course  of  his  operations  up  and  down 
the  Mississippi,  found  himself  in  New  Or- 
leans, and  there  made  the  acquaintance  of  my 
mother,  my  grandfather  Brander  having  recently 
removed  from  New  York.  For  two  or  three  years 
my  father  courted  my  mother,  in  New  Orleans  in 
the  winter,  and  in  the  summer  at  the  White  Sulphur 
Springs.  They  were  married  in  the  early  spring  of 
1851,  and  for  their  wedding  trip  they  went  on  their 
first  voyage  to  Europe.  In  the  fall  they  took  a  house 
in  New  Orleans,  and  there  I  was  born  on  the  21st 
of  February,  1852.  I  was  christened  James  Brander, 
after  my  mother's  father  —  James  being  also  the 
name  of  my  father's  father.  As  it  happened  I  was 
always  called  Brander  in  the  family  and  never 
James;  and  thus  it  was  that  when  I  became  a  man 
of  letters  and  felt  the  need  of  a  trademark  to  war- 
rant my  literary  wares,  I  dropped  out  of  my  signa- 
ture the  James  which  had  come  to  me  from  both 
my  grandfathers. 

Of  my  infancy  in  New  Orleans  I  can  recapture 
only  a  blurred  impression  of  a  single  walk  along  a 
broad  street;  I  was  holding  tight  to  my  grand- 

85 


36  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

father's  hand,  and  we  passed  in  front  of  a  vacant 
lot  shut  in  by  a  board  fence,  decorated  with  most 
terrifying  pictures  —  identifiable  now  as  probably 
the  posters  of  some  sensational  melodrama  of  the 
day.  Of  our  brief  semiannual  visits  to  Chicago, 
where  we  paused  every  spring  on  our  way  North, 
and  every  fall  on  our  return  to  the  South,  I  can  recall 
only  the  clear  memory  of  sidewalks  on  two  different 
levels,  so  that  we  were  frequently  forced  to  go  up 
or  to  go  down  half-a-dozen  steps,  more  or  less  of  a 
feat  for  my  infant  legs;  and  I  know  now  that  this 
must  have  been  in  the  year  when  Chicago  was 
bravely  and  boldly  raising  itself  above  the  muddy 
shore  of  the  lake.  And  of  the  Mississippi  steam- 
boats that  took  us  up  and  down  the  river  from  a 
point  opposite  Chicago,  I  find  I  can  evoke  no  vision 
at  all,  altho  my  mother  told  me  more  than  once 
that  on  one  trip  a  fellow-passenger,  a  lady  with 
obstreperous  children  of  her  own,  was  so  impressed 
by  my  exemplary  behavior  that  she  stopped  me  to 
ask  what  made  me  such  a  good  boy  —  to  which  I 
promptly  made  answer  that  it  was  because  when  I 
was  naughty  "my  mother  spanked  me  with  her 
slipper  and  my  nursey  with  her  india-rubber  shoe." 
This  explanation,  so  my  mother  commented  as  she 
told  the  tale,  might  be  a  statement  of  the  exact 
fact,  but  it  was  false  in  as  far  as  it  might  suggest 
that  these  dire  punishments  were  frequently  in- 
flicted. 

We  used  to  pass  thru  Chicago  on  our  way  from 
New  York  to  New  Orleans,  and  from  New  Orleans 
to  New  York,  because  there  was  in  the  early  fifties 


EARLY  SCHOOL-DAYS  37 

no  satisfactory  railroad  connection  thru  the  Southern 
States.  The  condition  of  travelling  had  been  even 
more  inconvenient  when  my  mother  was  a  girl  at 
school  in  New  York,  for  then  the  most  comfortable 
route  was  to  take  a  Hudson  River  steamboat  up 
to  Albany,  where  they  transferred  to  one  of  the 
commodious  passenger-packets  on  the  Erie  Canal, 
which  conveyed  them  in  course  of  time  to  Buffalo, 
where  they  got  on  board  a  lake-steamer  bound  to 
Chicago,  whence  a  stage-coach  carried  them  to  the 
nearest  town  on  the  Mississippi,  to  catch  the  first 
steamboat  stopping  there  on  its  long  trip  down  to 
New  Orleans. 

We  did  not  always  go  so  far  down  the  river  as 
New  Orleans,  for  we  spent  one  winter  at  St.  Louis. 
Here  again  I  can  call  back  only  a  single  picture, 
which  informs  me  now  that  it  must  have  imprinted 
itself  on  my  infant  retina  during  the  first  year  of 
the  siege  of  Sebastopol,  since  what  I  see  in  the  glass 
of  memory  is  a  gas-lit  room  wherein  a  negro  boy 
enters  bearing  the  evening  paper,  which  my  mother 
takes  up  at  once,  only  to  sigh  over  "the  sufferings 
of  the  poor  fellows  in  the  trenches." 

II 

We  did  not  always  go  South,  for  in  1857  we 
went  abroad  for  a  European  visit,  which  lasted  more 
than  a  year.  In  those  remote  days  the  southern 
countries  of  Europe  were  scarcely  better  provided 
with  railroads  than  the  southern  part  of  the  United 
States;  and  the  posting  system  still  survived.  So 


38  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

my  father  bought  a  comfortable  travelling-carriage 
in  Paris,  in  which  we  were  to  journey  as  far  south 
as  Naples.  This  carriage  had  a  rumble  behind,  for 
the  courier  and  for  my  nurse,  the  worthy  English- 
woman who  had  corrected  me  with  her  india-rubber 
shoe,  and  who  was  always  in  a  state  of  exasperated 
hostility  toward  her  Italian  travelling-companion, 
the  highly  efficient  courier.  Fitted  to  the  top  of 
the  carriage  were  three  large  shallow  boxes,  which 
contained  our  outfits,  and  which  were  unstrapped 
and  taken  to  our  rooms  when  we  stopped  for  the 
night. 

I  believe  that  we  went  by  rail  to  Basle,  taking 
the  carriage  with  us;  and  that  once  in  Switzerland 
we  had  to  depend  for  conveyance  on  our  own  ve- 
hicle, the  successive  post-houses,  a  few  miles  apart, 
supplying  us  regularly  with  four  horses,  ridden  by 
two  postilions.  Thus  it  was  that  my  father  and 
my  mother  first  saw  Switzerland,  and  in  a  far  more 
satisfactory  fashion  than  is  possible  to-day,  when 
the  railroads  rush  us  to  our  destination  by  the 
shortest  line,  whirling  us  over  valleys  and  whisking 
us  thru  mountains.  Our  carriage  wound  up  and 
down  the  lovely  valleys  at  a  leisurely  gait,  no  more 
rapid  in  the  descent  than  in  the  ascent,  since  our 
speed  in  going  down  was  checked  not  only  by  the 
brake,  but  also  by  wooden  shoes  slipped  under  the 
rear  wheels. 

I  regret  to  have  to  confess  that  our  zigzag  wander- 
ing thru  the  length  and  the  breadth  of  Switzerland 
in  the  summer  of  1857  did  not  photograph  itself 
on  my  memory;  and  that  the  only  negative  I  can 


EARLY  SCHOOL-DAYS  39 

now  develop  is  the  landscape  after  we  had  come  down 
into  Italy  on  the  way  to  Milan.  This  is  a  landscape 
with  figures,  the  flat  plain,  stretching  away  indefi- 
nitely, the  straight  road  lined  on  both  sides  with  tall, 
thin,  Lombardy  poplars,  the  carriage  rolling  smoothly 
behind  the  four  horses,  the  rising  and  falling  backs 
of  the  two  gaily  caparisoned  postilions  —  and  a 
small  boy  of  five  kneeling  on  the  front  seat,  facing 
forward,  and  now  and  again  calling  out,  "Avanti, 
postiglione ! " — not  that  he  was  in  any  hurry,  but 
rather  for  the  childish  pleasure  of  giving  orders  in  a 
foreign  tongue. 

By  a  linguistic  misunderstanding  related  to  me  in 
after  years  I  can  fix  the  fact  that  we  stayed  a  night 
in  Ferrara.  When  our  belongings  had  been  borne 
up  to  our  apartment,  the  head-waiter  appeared  to 
take  orders  for  our  dinner.  My  mother  asked  him 
if  it  would  not  be  possible  for  us  to  have  partridges. 
Owing  either  to  some  slip  in  her  use  of  the  tongue 
she  had  learned  from  Da  Ponte,  or  to  the  barrier 
interposed  by  the  harsh  local  dialect,  this  simple 
question  failed  to  be  correctly  understood.  At 
least,  this  is  what  my  mother  could  not  but  infer 
when  the  head-waiter  smiled  complacently  and  drew 
himself  up  and  answered:  "No,  Signora;  by  the 
grace  of  God  I  was  born  in  Ferrara!"  And  my 
mother  was  never  able  to  guess  how  her  inquiry 
had  been  transmogrified  into  a  question  to  which 
this  was  a  proper  answer. 

From  Ferrara  we  journeyed  in  time  to  Florence; 
and  there  my  father  ordered  from  Fedi,  the  sculptor, 
whose  'Rape  of  Polyxena'  had  just  been  placed  in 


40  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

the  Loggia  del  Lanzi,  a  statue  of  me  —  or  at  least, 
a  statue  of  a  boy  of  my  years,  riding  on  a  dolphin, 
and  possessing  a  head  for  which  I  posed,  and  which 
reveals  the  young  Arion  as  having  his  hair  artfully 
arranged  with  a  central  roll,  then  known  as  a 
"roach." 

We  went  on  to  Rome,  and  while  we  were  there  my 
father  and  mother  were  presented  to  the  Pope, 
Pius  IX;  and  they  took  me  with  them.  All  that  I 
can  now  recall  of  this  visit  to  the  Vatican  is  our 
walking  down  what  seemed  to  me  then  a  very  long 
gallery,  at  the  far  end  of  which  there  stood  a  mo- 
tionless figure  in  white  —  a  figure  which  my  mother, 
even  then  a  little  short-sighted,  took  at  first  for  a 
statue,  but  which  we  soon  recognized  as  that  of 
the  sovereign  pontiff  himself.  The  Pope  was  very 
gracious  to  the  little  Protestant  boy  of  five  who 
had  come  from  across  the  Atlantic,  and  who  looked 
up  at  him  with  wonder;  and  he  said  that  I  was 
very  young  to  have  travelled  so  far.  Then  he  be- 
stowed his  blessing  upon  all  three  of  us;  and  our 
audience  was  over. 

On  a  later  visit  to  Rome  I  was  told  about  the 
characteristically  clever  formula  which  Pius  IX  had 
invented  to  make  conversation  with  the  many 
strangers  from  all  parts  of  the  world  whom  he  per- 
mitted to  be  presented  to  him.  When  he  found 
the  person  with  whom  he  was  talking  a  little  at  a 
loss  for  a  topic,  he  used  to  ask  if  his  visitor  had 
been  long  in  Rome.  If  the  answer  was,  "A  few 
weeks  only,"  the  Pope  returned:  "Then  I  suppose 
you  have  seen  nearly  everything."  If  he  were  told 


EARLY  SCHOOL-DAYS  41 

that  the  stranger  had  spent  a  winter  in  the  Holy 
City,  he  rejoined:  "Then  I  suppose  you  are  begin- 
ning to  find  your  way  around?"  And  if  the  visitor 
explained  that  he  had  been  in  Rome  often  before, 
or  that  he  had  spent  a  year  or  more  there,  the  Pope 
would  smile  understandingly  and  respond:  'Then 
I  suppose  you  have  already  discovered  that  nobody 
can  ever  know  Rome !" 

In  the  earlier  months  of  1858  there  were  many 
American  families  in  Rome,  some  of  them  old  ac- 
quaintances of  my  parents;  and  I  recall  that  I  was 
taken  with  them  once  when  they  went  to  pay  a 
visit  to  Governor  and  Mrs.  Hamilton  Fish.  Under 
the  eyes  of  our  elders  I  had  a  shy  conversation  with 
two  of  the  sons  of  Mr.  Fish,  Hamilton  and  Stuy- 
vesant,  only  a  little  older  than  I,  not  then  fore- 
seeing that  we  three  would  next  meet  as  room- 
mates in  the  same  boarding-school,  and  that  the 
younger  of  them  would  be  my  classmate  in  Columbia 
College,  and  the  elder  my  classmate  in  the  law 
school. 

There  were  so  many  visitors  to  Rome  that  winter 
that  there  was  difficulty  in  securing  post-horses 
when  the  gay  season  ceased  suddenly  at  the  begin- 
ning of  Lent.  My  father  arranged  with  Governor 
Fish,  who  was  also  going  down  to  Naples,  that  the 
respective  departures  of  the  two  families  should  be 
so  timed  that  their  carriage  would  go  on  in  ad- 
vance of  ours,  and  thus  their  horses  after  an  inter- 
val of  rest  would  be  available  for  our  carriage. 
Our  delayed  departure  had  one  advantage  —  that 
we  were  able  to  linger  late  enough  on  the  evening 


42  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

of  Shrove  Tuesday  to  let  us  see  the  traditional  illu- 
mination of  tapers,  moccoletti,  all  along  the  Corso; 
but  it  had  the  disadvantage  that  we  had  to  journey 
thru  the  darkness.  Night-travel  in  the  Roman  ter- 
ritory was  then  believed  to  be  unhealthy  because 
of  the  malaria.  And  in  the  Neapolitan  territory 
even  day -travel  was  none  too  safe,  because  of  brig- 
andage. My  father  had  to  forego  the  trip  to 
Psestum,  in  consequence  of  the  warnings  he  re- 
ceived in  regard  to  the  insecurity  of  the  roads  and 
the  danger  of  being  held  for  ransom  —  a  danger 
which  he  might  have  risked  for  himself  but  to 
which  he  was  naturally  unwilling  to  expose  his 
young  wife. 

Ill 

We  returned  to  the  United  States  for  the  next 
winter,  which  we  spent  at  the  New  York  Hotel  on 
the  corner  of  Broadway  and  Waverly  Place,  then 
perhaps  the  hotel  where  the  pleasantest  people 
were  likely  to  be  found;  especially  was  it  a  gather- 
ing-place for  Southerners.  I  think  it  likely  that 
my  father  was  attracted  to  it  because  his  old  friend, 
Isaac  Sherman,  was  then  staying  there;  and  I  re- 
call Mr.  Sherman's  daughter,  a  pretty  girl  with  her 
long  hair  hanging  down  in  pigtails  —  a  daughter 
now  long  resident  in  England,  but  still  remembered 
in  New  York  as  the  giver  of  the  widely  discussed 
Bradley-Martin  ball.  I  can  replevin  from  out  of 
the  past  only  two  things  associated  with  that  win- 
ter —  the  vision  of  the  comet,  to  be  seen  night  after 


EARLY  SCHOOL-DAYS  43 

night,  and  peered  at  by  me  always  from  the  same 
window  of  the  long  corridor  thru  which  I  was  being 
led  away  to  bed;  and  second  the  lively  picture  of 
Broadway  after  an  unusually  heavy  snow-storm, 
when  it  was  thronged  with  sleighs  of  all  sorts  and 
sizes,  dominated  by  the  huge  open  omnibuses  on 
runners  drawn  by  four  horses  and  made  comforta- 
ble by  many  buffalo-robes  and  by  abundant  straw 
thick  about  the  feet  of  the  passengers. 

The  New  York  Hotel  was  then  kept  by  a  Mr. 
Cranston  (who  afterward  bought  Cozzen's  hotel  on 
the  Hudson,  a  little  below  West  Point,  and  changed 
its  name  to  his  own).  While  we  were  residing  in 
his  hotel  that  winter  of  1858-9,  he  was  the  victim 
of  a  murderous  assault  from  the  effects  of  which  he 
did  not  recover  for  months.  A  man  had  brought  his 
family  to  the  hotel;  and  the  landlord  found  out  that 
one  of  the  children  was  down  with  some  contagious 
disease.  To  protect  the  other  guests  of  his  house, 
Cranston  compelled  the  removal  of  this  sick  child 
to  the  hospital.  I  am  under  the  impression  that 
this  removal  may  have  taken  place  while  the  sick 
child's  father  was  absent;  but  at  any  rate  it  so 
enraged  him  that  he  came  into  the  dining-room  of 
the  hotel,  where  the  landlord  was  sitting  at  dinner, 
and  lifting  up  the  champagne  bottle  which  stood 
in  a  bucket  of  ice  beside  the  chair,  he  smashed  it 
over  Cranston's  head. 

In  the  quarter  of  a  century  since  my  father  had 
escaped  from  Cape  Cod  he  had  never  settled  him- 
self for  long  in  any  one  place,  roving  from  North 
to  South,  and  from  East  to  West  as  he  heard  the 


44  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

summons  of  opportunity.  My  mother  had  been 
born  in  Petersburg,  and  she  had  gone  with  her 
father  when  he  removed  from  Virginia  to  New  York, 
and  from  New  York  to  New  Orleans;  but  she  felt 
herself  most  at  home  in  New  York,  where  she  had 
spent  part  of  her  girlhood,  and  where  she  had  been 
at  school.  When  she  had  first  seen  New  York  it 
was  still  a  sprawling  little  town,  cluttering  only  the 
toe  of  Manhattan  Island;  for  a  year  or  two  my 
grandfather  had  resided  on  the  Battery,  then  a 
center  of  fashion;  and  one  summer  the  family  went 
out  of  town  to  Niblo's  Garden  —  which  was  on 
the  corner  of  Broadway  and  Prince  Street,  and 
which  was  later  to  become  the  site  of  a  long-famous 
theater.  Since  my  mother's  childhood  the  city  had 
been  steadily  spreading  upward  and  outward;  and 
it  was  more  than  a  mile  to  the  north  of  Niblo's 
Garden  that  my  father  found  a  house  to  his  taste, 
a  house  built  by  an  architect  for  his  own  occupancy. 
My  father  had  decided  to  settle  down  permanently 
in  New  York,  and  to  make  it  the  home  of  his  family. 
So  it  was  that  after  infant  wanderings  in  the  South 
and  in  the  Middle  West  and  in  Europe,  I  became  a 
New  Yorker  when  I  was  seven  years  old. 

The  house  which  my  father  purchased  in  1859 
to  present  to  my  mother  was  a  spacious  and  com- 
modious dwelling  on  the  east  side  of  Fifth  Avenue 
between  Seventeenth  and  Eighteenth  Streets,  in 
what  was  then  the  most  attractive  part  of  that  most 
famous  of  residence  thorofares,  a  part  now  wholly 
unattractive,  alas !  shorn  of  its  splendors  and  aban- 
doned to  huge  sweat-shops,  whose  outlandish  work- 


EARLY  SCHOOL-DAYS  45 

ers  take  their  nooning  on  its  impassable  sidewalks. 
When  we  moved  into  101  Fifth  Avenue  there  was 
not  a  shop  of  any  kind  anywhere  up  and  down  the 
length  of  the  stately  street.  So  hostile  was  the 
sentiment  of  the  dwellers  on  the  avenue  toward 
the  invasion  of  trade  that  it  must  have  taken  des- 
perate courage  for  the  first  shopkeeper  to  intrude 
into  the  consecrated  region,  and  all  the  more  ex- 
traordinary is  it  therefore,  that  the  breach  should 
have  been  made  by  a  member  of  a  calling  so  timor- 
ous that  it  is  traditionally  credited  with  only  the 
ninth  part  of  a  soul.  Yet  less  than  half-a-dozen 
years  after  we  had  settled  down  in  our  new  home 
George  Arnold  rimed  a  wail  of  lament  that  the 
avenue  was 

falling  from  grace 
at  a  terrible  pace. 
I  hear,  when  I  promenade  there, 
Strange  voices  of  grief  in  the  air; 
And  I  fancy  I  see, 
The  sad  sisters  three, 
With  their  black  trailing  dresses 
And  dishevelled  tresses 
Go,  solemn  and  slow, 
To  and  fro, 
In  their  woe, 
Sighing, 
And  crying, 
Eheu  !     Eheu  !     Eheu  ! 
There's  a  tailor  in  Fifth  Avenue ! 

The  name  of  this  first  daring  invader  is  now  lost 
in  the  dark  abyss  of  Time;  but  another  half-a-dozen 
years  later,  when  I  was  a  sophomore  at  Columbia 


46  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

College,  there  burgeoned  forth  on  the  corner  below 
us  a  gilded  sign  boldly  proclaiming  the  opening  of 
a  shop  by  "G.  D.  Happy,  Tailor"  —  an  offensive 
proclamation  which  evoked  from  my  classmate, 
Stuyvesant  Fish,  the  remark  that  if  this  tailor  met 
with  failure,  he  would  not  be  so  G —  d —  happy. 

IV 

Even  in  1860,  when  we  took  possession  of  our  new 
home,  the  residences  on  Fifth  Avenue  had  pushed 
themselves  only  so  far  up-town  as  the  crest  of  Murray 
Hill;  and  the  mile  or  more  that  stretched  up  to  the 
still  incomplete  Central  Park  was  but  sparsely  built 
on.  Union  Square  and  Madison  Square  (which  had 
only  recently  become  celebrated  as  the  abode  of 
Miss  Flora  McFlimsey)  were  all  girt  about  by  brown  - 
stone,  high-stoop  residences  of  an  unimaginative 
monotony;  there  was  also  a  corresponding  settle- 
ment of  the  older  New  York  families  as  far  east  as 
Stuyvesant  Square.  On  the  north  side  of  Union 
Square  was  the  spacious  residence  of  Mrs.  Parish 
(soon  to  serve  as  the  first  house  of  the  Union  League 
Club);  and  there  I  was  taken  to  gaze  wonderingly 
at  the  very  elaborate  model,  ten  or  fifteen  feet  long, 
of  a  plan  for  Central  Park,  which  Mrs.  Parish  had 
submitted  and  which  had  been  rejected  in  favor  of 
that  prepared  by  Frederick  Law  Olmstead. 

As  I  try  to  sort  out  the  disappointing  packages  in 
the  lucky  bag  of  reminiscences  accumulated  by  the 
not  very  observant  small  boy  of  eight  that  I  was  in 
those  far-off  years,  I  discover  that  the  white-marble 


EARLY  SCHOOL-DAYS  47 

Fifth  Avenue  Hotel  had  just  been  opened,  and  that 
it  was  considered  to  be  truly  worthy  of  the  Empire 
City,  more  especially  since  it  was  equipped  with  a 
passenger-elevator  that  rose  with  slow  and  solemn 
dignity,  on  a  solid  iron  shaft  thrust  up  out  of  a  deep 
hole  in  the  ground.  And  I  believe  that  my  mother 
once  told  me  that  I  had  seen  Abraham  Lincoln 
drive  past  the  New  York  Hotel  on  his  flying  visit 
to  the  city  to  deliver  the  address  at  Cooper  Union 
which  made  possible  his  renomination  for  the  presi- 
dency. I  know  that  my  father  voted  for  Bell  and 
Everett;  and  I  think  I  can  recall  his  doubts  about 
Lincoln  as  an  uncouth  and  untried  backwoodsman, 
wholly  unfitted  to  be  President  at  that  climax  of 
political  tension. 

What  I  do  remember  distinctly  was  my  being 
allowed  to  sit  up  far  beyond  my  usual  hour  to  see 
the  torchlight  procession  of  Lincoln's  supporters, 
the  glittering  parade  of  the  "wide-awakes,"  as  they 
were  called.  And  with  equal  distinctness  I  remem- 
ber that  a  few  weeks  later  —  altho  it  may  have 
been  a  few  weeks  earlier  —  I  was  permitted  to  be- 
hold a  second  nocturnal  spectacle,  the  parade  of 
the  about-to-be-abolished  Volunteer  Fire  Depart- 
ment, which  took  place  in  honor  of  the  Prince  of 
Wales.  My  childish  fancy  was  greatly  taken  by  a 
huge  stuffed  tiger  which  adorned  the  top  of  "Big 
Six";  and  I  know  now  that  the  man  who  was  then 
foreman  of  "Big  Six"  was  William  M.  Tweed, 
afterward  to  win  a  world-wide  infamy  as  the  chief 
of  the  Tammany  ring  which  robbed  the  city  of 
many  millions. 


48  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

I  had  attended  the  class  for  little  boys  at  a  girl's 
school  kept  by  two  friends  of  my  mother's,  the 
Misses  Sedgwick;  and  in  the  fall  of  1860  I  was  sent 
for  the  first  time  to  a  boy's  school.  This  was  kept 
by  Mr.  George  C.  Anthon,  a  nephew  of  Professor 
Charles  Anthon  of  Columbia  College;  it  was  distant 
only  a  single  block  from  our  house,  being  held  in  a 
dwelling  (still  standing  as  I  pass  these  pages  in 
1917)  on  the  southeast  corner  of  Broadway  and 
Eighteenth  Street.  It  was  a  block  below  the  Goelet 
house,  with  its  high  iron  railing,  thru  which  Henry 
James  used  to  peer  a  few  years  earlier  when  he  was 
a  small  boy,  and  which  even  then  sheltered  the 
Peacock  and  the  Cow  that  Sidney  Rosenfeld  was  to 
celebrate  in  lively  rimes  just  before  this  last  vestige 
of  rusticity  disappeared  to  give  place  to  a  business 
building.  Mr.  Anthon 's  school  had  for  me  the 
further  advantage  of  being  exactly  opposite  the 
best  toy -store  in  New  York,  a  dark  but  most  allur- 
ing repository  of  varied  joys  kept  by  a  Frenchman 
named  Phillipoteaux. 

Perhaps  because  I  was  an  only  son  of  indulgent 
parents  I  was  unduly  self-assertive  and  opinionated, 
not  to  say  forthputting.  Those  were  the  days  of 
the  Heenan  and  Sayers  prize-fight;  and  most  Ameri- 
cans loyally  believed  that  the  Benecia  Boy  had  been 
cheated  out  of  his  well-won  victory  by  the  bad 
faith  of  the  British  onlookers,  who  saw  the  battle 
going  against  their  favorite.  I  do  not  record  it  as 
a  testimony  to  my  popularity,  for  perhaps  that  is 
just  what  it  is  not;  but  it  is  a  fact  nevertheless  that 
I  soon  received  from  my  schoolmates  the  nickname 


EARLY  SCHOOLDAYS  49 

of  the  Benecia  Boy,  probably  not  so  much  from  any 
approved  prowess  as  from  my  willingness  to  enter 
on  a  quarrel.  It  seems  to  me  now,  more  than  half 
a  century  later,  as  I  look  back  over  my  more  mature 
years,  that  I  am  a  mild-mannered  man,  not  given 
to  brawling;  and  therefore  I  am  a  little  at  a  loss 
to  account  for  my  juvenile  efflorescence  of  pugnacity. 
Of  very  trifling  value  are  my  other  reminiscences 
of  the  two  years  I  spent  at  Mr.  Anthon's  school. 
My  admiration  was  excited  by  the  surprising  skill 
of  one  of  the  teachers  who  had  carved  a  block  of 
chalk  into  a  miniature  model  of  the  staring  white 
Fifth  Avenue  Hotel.  My  palate  was  gratified  by 
the  six-inch  lengths  of  ripe  sugar-cane,  from  which 
I  was  privileged  to  suck  the  juice  —  this  gratifica- 
tion of  my  palate  taking  place  at  the  house  of  my 
schoolfellow  Bradish  Johnson,  whose  father  owned 
a  sugar-plantation  in  Louisiana.  And  my  regret 
was  aroused  by  the  conflagration  of  the  Crystal 
Palace,  which  I  had  been  permitted  to  visit,  and 
which  had  stood  in  what  is  now  Bryant  Park,  be- 
hind the  Public  Library  that  has  replaced  the  Reser- 
voir. 


What  I  recall  with  a  keener  pleasure  is  the  fact 
that  I  was  now  allowed  to  enter  the  enchanted  realm 
of  the  theater  —  enchanting  to  me  even  before  I 
had  come  under  its  spell,  for  when  we  were  in  Lon- 
don in  1858  my  parents  had  gone  to  see  Mr.  and 
Mrs.  Charles  Kean  in  their  sumptuous  revival  of 


50  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

the  *  Tempest'  at  the  Princess's  Theater;  and  as  I 
was  then  only  six  years  old  there  had  been  no 
thought  of  taking  me.  But  when  my  mother  the 
next  morning  told  me  all  about  the  wonders  of  the 
spectacle  she  had  seen,  I  was  greatly  aggrieved  that 
I  had  not  been  permitted  to  behold  all  these  glories 
for  myself.  It  must  have  been  before  I  was  eight 
that  I  was  taken  to  Laura  Keene's  to  see  my  first 
play  with  my  own  eyes;  it  was  Boucicault's  drama- 
tization of  the  'Heart  of  Midlothian,'  which  he 
called  '  Jeanie  Deans,'  after  the  heroine  impersonated 
by  his  wife;  and  to  this  day  I  can  re  visualize  one 
sensational  moment,  when  the  huge  doors  of  the 
Tolbooth  were  at  last  broken  in  by  the  howling 
mob  which  had  stormed  the  prison  and  which 
swarmed  all  over  the  stage.  It  must  have  been 
before  I  was  ten  that  I  was  taken  to  Niblo's  Garden 
to  see  Edwin  Forrest  in  'Macbeth';  and  as  this  was 
also  a  play  of  Scottish  life  and  character,  I  infer 
that  I  owed  both  of  these  early  joys  to  my  mother's 
father.  It  was  probably  between  these  two  North- 
British  plays  that  I  witnessed  a  performance  better 
suited  to  my  tender  years  —  that  of  the  Ravels, 
those  ingenious  and  accomplished  pantomimists, 
whose  art  I  was  then  unable  to  appreciate,  but  whose 
adroitness  I  could  marvel  at,  especially  when  they 
cut  up  a  live  man  only  to  put  the  pieces  together 
again  so  that  he  could  walk  off  in  possession  of  all 
his  members.  And  it  must  have  been  before  J.  W. 
Wallack  built  his  theater  at  the  northeast  corner  of 
Broadway  and  13th  Street  that  I  was  allowed  to 
go  to  Grizzly  Adams's  Bear  Show,  in  a  tent  on 


EARLY  SCHOOL-DAYS  51 

the  lot  where  the  new  playhouse  was  soon  to  be 
erected. 

There  were  other  and  more  thrilling  spectacles 
out  in  the  open  streets  of  the  city  when  the  war 
began  with  the  shot  on  Fort  Sumter: 

"Rata-tat-tat ! 

Those  were  the  sounds  of  that  battle  summer, 
Till  the  earth  seemed  a  parchment  round  and  flat, 
And  every  footfall  the  tap  of  a  drummer." 

In  the  summer  of  1860  we  had  spent  a  few  weeks 
at  Cozzen's  Hotel  just  below  West  Point,  and  there 
I  had  stared  up  at  the  tall  bulk  of  General  Scott, 
and  had  watched  with  wonder  the  swift  evolutions 
of  Ellsworth's  little  company  of  Zouaves  which  had 
camped  in  the  grounds  of  the  hotel.  But  now  in 
New  York  what  I  saw  was  not  the  parade  drill  of  a 
single  crack  company,  but  regiment  after  regiment 
tramping  day  after  day  down  the  Avenue  on  their 
way  to  the  front.  They  came  from  the  north  by 
the  Hudson  River  road,  which  had  a  dingy  station 
at  Ninth  Avenue  and  29th  Street,  or  from  the  east 
by  the  New  Haven  road,  which  had  an  even  dingier 
station  at  Fourth  Avenue  and  27th  Street  (where 
the  Madison  Square  Garden  now  stands).  Early 
in  the  morning  or  late  in  the  evening  the  drums 
rattled  past  our  door  and  the  fifes  shrilled  out,  since 
all  the  countless  thousands  were  hurried  forward 
from  the  cars  to  the  ferry,  no  matter  what  the 
hour  when  the  several  organizations  might  reach 
the  city. 

One  regiment  I  recall  with  special  distinctness, 


52  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

because  I  saw  it  go  and  I  saw  it  come  back.  To 
the  massive  music  of  'John  Brown's  Body'  it  marched 
past  us  more  than  a  thousand  strong,  and  I  was 
told  that  every  man  in  its  ranks  was  over  six  feet, 
stalwart  loggers  all  of  them,  from  the  woods  of 
Maine;  this  must  have  been  early  in  the  summer  of 
1861,  and  they  must  have  been  ninety-day  men,  for 
in  the  fall  they  returned,  a  scant  three  hundred,  all 
that  the  swamps  of  Virginia  had  spared. 

The  departure  of  the  Seventh  in  the  first  month 
of  the  war  I  long  believed  that  I  had  seen  with  my 
own  eyes  —  so  believing,  perhaps,  because  of  the 
impression  produced  by  Theodore  Winthrop's  viva- 
cious description.  But  when,  just  fifty  years  later, 
in  April,  1911,  the  regiment  repeated  its  famous 
march  of  April,  1861,  it  started  from  its  old  armory 
in  Third  Avenue,  opposite  the  Cooper  Union;  and 
then  I  discovered  that  I  had  deceived  myself  into 
supposing  that  it  had  somehow  passed  our  house  in 
Fifth  Avenue,  half  a  mile  farther  up-town.  This  is 
an  instance  of  the  danger  of  remembering  what 
never  happened;  and  I  shall  have  another  example 
to  cite  when  I  come  to  record  my  memories  of  the 
downfall  of  the  empire  in  Paris,  in  September,  1870. 

For  four  wearing  and  wearying  years  thousands 
of  troops  swung  along  briskly  in  their  way  to  the 
war;  and  now  and  then  a  few  hundreds  retraced 
their  steps  toward  their  distant  homes.  But  I  was 
in  New  York  only  the  first  and  the  last  years  of  the 
four,  spending  the  two  intermediate  years  at  a 
boarding-school  out  of  town. 

Of  my  several  teachers  at  Mr.  Anthon's  school, 


EARLY  SCHOOL-DAYS  53 

or  of  the  studies  prescribed  for  me,  I  have  no  clear 
memory  —  tho  I  do  recall  one  pleasing  custom, 
that  of  bestowing  little  silver  medals  at  the  end  of 
the  school-year,  every  medal  engraved  with  the 
name  of  the  study  in  which  the  recipient  had  ex- 
celled. The  diligent  students  might  win  more  than 
one  of  these  tokens  if  they  were  superior  in  diverse 
departments  of  learning.  But  an  unbreakable  tra- 
dition imposed  upon  Mr.  Anthon  the  obligation  of 
giving  at  least  one  medal  to  every  boy,  no  matter 
how  sadly  he  might  have  lacked  application.  Thus 
it  was  that  at  the  end  of  my  first  year  when  I  was 
only  eight  years  old  I  proudly  exhibited  to  my 
parents  a  tiny  silver  maltese  cross  which  declared 
that  I  had  distinguished  myself  in  "English  Gram- 
mar," a  subject  certainly  as  little  attractive  to  me 
as  any  other.  And  at  the  end  of  my  second  year 
I  brought  back  another  of  these  rewards  of  merit, 
inscribed  "Good  Conduct."  When  my  father  came 
home  this  was  displayed  to  him,  with  a  certain 
diffidence  on  my  part,  since  I  was  well  aware  that 
my  weekly  reports  had  not  altogether  justified  this 
reward.  My  father  looked  at  it  rather  doubtfully; 
and  then  he  took  from  his  pocket  a  letter  that  he 
had  received  that  very  morning  from  Mr.  Anthon, 
saying  that  I  was  not  profiting  by  his  instruction  as 
fully  as  I  might,  and  that  he  thought,  therefore,  I 
had  better  be  sent  to  a  boarding-school,  where  there 
would  be  fewer  distractions  to  interfere  with  my 
application  to  my  studies. 


CHAPTER  IV 
LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS 


WHEN  I  strive  to  decipher  and  to  interpret 
the  palimpsest  of  my  past,  and  as  an 
elderly  man  to  discover  what  manner  of 
strange  being  I  must  have  been  as  a  young  boy,  I 
am  regretfully  compelled  toward  the  conviction 
that  I  was  none  too  easy  to  get  on  with,  and  that  I 
must  have  been  often  rather  trying  to  my  parents, 
as  well  as  to  my  teachers.  My  father  may  have 
had  ample  reasons  of  his  own  for  sending  me  away 
to  boarding-school,  in  addition  to  those  supplied 
by  Mr.  Anthon.  It  seems  to  me  now  that  if  I  could 
to-day  meet  myself  as  I  then  was,  the  association 
might  not  be  altogether  agreeable  for  the  elder  of 
us.  Under  my  sexagenarian  scrutiny  the  little  lad 
of  less  than  ten  takes  on  the  image  of  a  spoilt  child, 
lazy,  wilful,  and  inconsiderate.  No  longer  can  I 
recognize  the  good  boy  of  the  Mississippi  river- 
boat,  and  I  ask  myself  whether  the  change  for  the 
worse  may  not  have  been  the  result  of  less  frequent 
applications  of  the  maternal  slipper,  and  of  the 
ancillary  india-rubber  shoe. 

For  me  discipline  was  plainly  "indicated,"  as  the 
physicians  say;  and  perhaps  this  was  the  motive 
which  governed  my  father  in  sending  me  to  a  mili- 

54 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  55 

tary  school  at  Sing  Sing,  founded  by  a  former 
West  Pointer,  by  the  name  of  Churchill.  More 
probably,  however,  my  father  chose  Churchill's 
because  it  was  recommended  by  friends  whose  sons 
had  been  there.  I  was  to  enter  in  the  fall;  and  in 
the  spring  we  went  up  to  examine  the  school  and  to 
be  spectators  of  the  final  parade  drill  of  the  four 
companies  into  which  the  fifty  boys  were  divided. 
On  this  occasion  the  word  of  command  was  given 
by  an  old  boy  about  to  leave  the  school  to  enter 
Harvard  —  J.  Hampden  Robb,  who  was  the  son 
of  a  friend  of  my  father's,  and  who  afterward  served 
as  lieutenant-governor  of  New  York,  in  which  office 
he  led  the  movement  for  rescuing  Niagara  Falls. 
Two  sons  of  Governor  Fish  were  already  entered, 
and  when  I  came  back  in  the  fall  to  begin  work,  I 
had  the  good  fortune  to  share  a  room  with  Hamilton 
Fish,  Jr.,  and  with  Stuyvesant  Fish. 

I  was  only  nine  when  I  went  to  Sing  Sing;  I 
was  only  eleven  when  I  escaped  from  it;  and  I  had 
a  more  or  less  unhappy  two  years  there.  The  only 
son  of  indulgent  parents,  I  was  probably  conceited 
and  bumptious;  and  the  elder  boys  indulged  in 
more  bullying  than  was  beneficial  for  the  proper 
correction  of  these  defects  in  my  character.  I  was 
the  smallest  boy  in  the  school  except  three,  and 
with  these  smaller  boys  my  relations  were  ever 
friendly  in  spite  of  the  fights  into  which  we  were 
forced.  We  were  awakened  every  morning  by  the 
sudden  roll  of  the  drum,  and  we  had  to  get  up  as 
early  on  Sundays  as  on  week-days.  This  left  a  long 
and  empty  interval  between  breakfast  and  church, 


56  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

an  interval  which  invited  the  idleness  of  the  older 
boys  to  the  devising  of  mischief.  One  of  their 
many  inventions,  kept  in  working  order  Sunday 
after  Sunday,  was  to  herd  the  smaller  boys  into  the 
gymnasium  and  to  compel  them  to  combat.  Under 
this  practice  my  early  pugnacity  speedily  departed. 
It  was  soon  found  that  I  was  a  little  more  than  a 
match  for  the  boy  below  me  in  stature,  and  therefore 
the  two  smallest  boys  were  set  on  me  at  once,  I 
being  permitted  the  privilege  of  setting  my  back 
to  the  wall  so  that  they  could  assault  me  only  from 
the  front.  In  spite  of  this  privilege  it  was  easily 
discovered  that  the  pair  were  a  little  more  than  a 
match  for  me.  I  cannot  help  thinking  that  it  speaks 
well  for  all  four  of  us  youngsters  that  these  Sunday 
encounters  did  not  interfere  with  our  week-day 
friendliness  of  association. 

When  the  warmer  days  of  early  summer  came 
the  whole  school  was  marched  down  to  the  Hudson 
River,  to  a  little  bay  with  a  sandy,  shelving  shore; 
and  here  we  went  in  swimming.  Now,  it  was  an 
unfortunate  fact  that  I  had  never  before  entered 
into  open  water;  and  altho  my  father  had  been  in 
his  youth  a  sturdy  swimmer,  he  had  not  caused  me 
to  acquire  the  art.  At  Churchill's  it  was  the  tra- 
ditional prerogative  of  every  old  boy  to  duck  every 
new  boy  three  times,  and  on  this  first  occasion  of 
my  "going  in  swimming"  I  suffered  severely  from 
my  inexperience.  With  the  serenely  unconscious 
cruelty  of  youth,  I  was  seized  without  warning  by 
boy  after  boy,  and  thrust  under  water  again  and 
again  until  I  was  almost  unconscious.  If  I  did  not 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  57 

then  come  near  drowning  I  certainly  thought  so  at 
the  time.  Altho  I  come  of  seafaring  stock,  and  altho 
I  now  enjoy  nothing  better  than  to  withstand  the 
breakers  at  Narragansett,  the  impression  made  on 
me  by  this  ducking  when  I  was  only  ten  has  been 
so  indelible  that  to  this  day  I  cannot  find  my  head 
under  water  without  a  return  of  my  unreasonable 
juvenile  terror. 

The  painful  submersions  were  repeated  merci- 
lessly at  every  one  of  our  trips  to  the  river  that 
summer;  and  all  the  next  winter  the  dread  of  what 
was  in  store  for  me  when  the  time  should  come  for 
the  school  to  go  down  to  the  river  oppressed  me  like 
a  nightmare.  And  thus  it  was  that  when  the  late 
spring  of  1863  arrived,  and  a  visit  to  the  bathing 
beach  loomed  nearer  and  nearer,  I  ran  away.  I  had 
only  pocket-money  enough  to  carry  me  a  short  dis- 
tance on  the  railroad;  so  I  went  to  Cozzen's,  where 
my  grandfather  was  staying.  He  sympathized  with 
my  tale  of  woe;  but  he  bade  me  go  back  to  school 
at  once.  In  fact,  he  took  me  across  the  river  to 
Garrison,  and  put  me  on  the  train.  But  he  had 
supplied  me  with  money,  and  when  the  train  stopped 
at  Sing  Sing  I  kept  my  seat.  Two  hours  later  I  was 
back  in  my  own  home  in  New  York.  And  when 
my  father  arrived  that  evening  he  found  awaiting 
him  a  telegram  from  Mr.  Churchill,  stating  that  it 
was  a  rule  of  the  school  never  to  take  back  a  boy 
who  had  run  away. 

This  must  have  been  in  June,  when  the  family 
had  already  gone  up  to  Saratoga;  and  there  my 
father  took  me  with  him.  We  had  comfortable 


58  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

rooms  in  the  "  cottage- wing "  of  the  United  States 
Hotel.  That  was  the  summer  when  the  Civil  War 
was  coming  to  its  climax,  and  when  the  cry  of  the 
American  people  was  (in  Holmes's  apt  phrase)  for 
Bread  and  the  Newspapers  —  only  the  newspapers 
could  not  satisfy  the  feverish  craving  for  immediate 
information  about  all  the  incessant  happenings,  on 
any  one  of  which  might  hang  the  fate  of  the  nation. 
In  the  first  month  that  I  was  at  Saratoga,  playing 
peacefully  with  the  other  boys  under  the  ample 
shade  of  the  huge  trees  which  branched  loftily  over 
the  inner  grounds  of  the  hotel,  Grant  took  Vicks- 
burg,  and  Lee  was  repulsed  at  Gettysburg.  The 
taking  of  Vicksburg  I  must  have  heard  about  at  the 
time,  but  it  did  not  impress  itself  upon  me,  over- 
shadowed as  it  was  by  the  mighty  struggle  at  Gettys- 
burg, in  the  next  State  to  us,  and  only  a  few  hundred 
miles  away.  The  strain  of  those  three  days  of  wait- 
ing, the  terrific  tension  of  anxiety,  was  felt  even  by 
the  youngest  of  the  hundreds  who  filled  the  im- 
mense hotel. 

The  telegraph  office  was  directly  opposite  our 
rooms  on  the  southern  side  of  the  U-shaped  inner 
court  of  the  hotel;  and  there  was  always  a  crowd 
clustered  about  the  bulletin-board,  to  which  the 
operator  affixed  the  latest  telegrams  as  fast  as  he 
could  take  them  off  the  wires.  That  knot  of  men 
and  women,  waiting  hour  after  hour,  was  now  larger 
and  now  smaller,  but  it  never  melted  away  during 
all  my  waking  hours  in  those  three  days  of  dreadful 
doubt.  Sometimes  a  sudden  cheer  broke  out,  caught 
up  by  those  who  came  hurry  ing  over  the  lawns, 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  59 

and  sometimes  there  fell  suddenly  a  chill  silence 
almost  as  startling,  after  which  I  could  see  little 
groups  talking  sadly  in  whispers.  No  matter  how 
young  we  were  then,  no  one  of  us  who  lived  thru 
that  week  of  alternate  hope  and  fear  can  ever  for- 
get it. 

II 

In  the  fall  of  1863,  when  I  was  eleven,  I  was  sent 
to  another  day-school  in  New  York,  the  Charlier 
Institute,  which  occupied  two  connecting  dwellings 
on  the  south  side  of  24th  Street,  beyond  Fourth 
Avenue  and  nearer  to  Lexington  —  both  of  them 
still  standing  as  I  revise  this  chapter  in  1917.  Elie 
Charlier  was  a  Frenchman,  and  French  was  sup- 
posed to  be  the  language  of  the  school.  In  French 
we  studied  arithmetic,  altho  we  had  our  Latin  and 
Greek  lessons  in  English.  French  we  were  expected 
to  speak  to  each  other  even  in  our  play-hours;  and 
we  were  required  to  confess  every  day  at  the  end  of 
school  whether  or  not  we  had  broken  this  rule,  and 
to  declare  how  many  words  of  English  we  had  al- 
lowed ourselves.  I  feel  sure  that  many  of  us  failed 
to  make  a  practice  of  the  complete  confession  which 
should  precede  absolution;  and  that  most  of  us 
kept  rather  the  letter  of  the  law  than  its  spirit. 
When  we  failed  to  find  at  the  tip  of  our  tongues  the 
needed  but  unfamiliar  word  of  the  foreign  language, 
we  were  prone  to  satisfy  our  consciences  by  giving 
a  French  pronunciation  and  perhaps  also  a  French 
termination  to  the  more  immediately  available 
English  word. 


60  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Yet,  even  if  our  speech  was  often  only  a  pitiably 
hybrid  Gallic,  the  constant  effort  to  speak  French 
was  its  own  reward;  and  I  must  then  have  acquired 
at  least  the  rudiments  of  the  colloquial  French  of 
which  I  found  myself  later  in  possession  —  a  col- 
loquial French  often  ungrammatical  enough,  but 
generally  idiomatic  and  almost  unfailingly  fluent. 
That  some  of  my  schoolfellows  long  retained  our 
old  trick  of  piecing  out  our  French  with  approxi- 
mate English  vocables  was  revealed  to  me  half-a- 
dozen  years  later  when  I  was  seeing  the  old  year 
out  and  the  new  year  in  at  Delmonico's  with  several 
of  my  Columbia  classmates.  Catching  sight  of  me, 
a  Charlier  friend  joined  us,  moving  from  the  next 
table,  the  waiter  of  which  he  summoned  with  the 
outlandish  inquiry:  "Ou  sont  ces  deux  drinks  que 
j'ai  ordonne?"  Then  he  turned  to  me  with  a  com- 
placent smile  and  said:  "I  suppose  you  don't  keep 
up  your  French  now,  eh?" 

We  used  to  take  our  lunches  with  us  to  Charlier's, 
and  when  the  weather  permitted  we  marched  in 
columns  of  two  under  the  eyes  of  accompanying 
teachers  across  Fourth  and  Madison  Avenues  to 
Madison  Square,  where  we  ate  what  we  had  brought, 
and  where  we  played  games  afterward,  or  did  as 
we  pleased  for  half  an  hour.  Madison  Square  was 
then  girt  in  by  iron  railings,  as  was  also  Union 
Square;  and  as  it  was  surrounded  then  only  by 
residences,  with  few  or  no  shops  in  the  vicinity, 
we  had  it  to  ourselves  as  a  playground.  I  got 
along  well  enough  with  my  new  schoolmates,  altho 
I  have  an  impression  that  I  was  not  really  popular. 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  61 

The  overt  pugnacity  of  my  Anthon  years  had  been 
tamed  by  the  hardness  of  my  Churchill  years;  and 
my  Charlier  years  were  in  the  main  peaceful.  I  can 
recall  only  one  quarrel  with  a  schoolfellow,  fought 
out  fairly  in  a  secluded  corner  of  Madison  Square, 
half  hidden  by  thick  shrubbery.  This  was  in  the 
northeast  corner,  opposite  the  sunken  lot,  which 
Leonard  Jerome  was  then  utilizing  as  a  private 
skating-rink,  and  which  was  soon  to  serve  as  the 
site  of  the  second  home  of  the  Union  League  Club. 

During  the  first  winter  that  I  spent  at  Charlier's 
the  great  fair  was  held  in  New  York  for  the  benefit 
of  the  Sanitary  Commission,  the  forerunner  of  our 
modern  Red  Cross  societies.  My  father,  altho  he 
had  voted  for  Bell  and  Everett,  and  altho  he  had 
had  doubts  as  to  the  fitness  of  Abraham  Lincoln  for 
the  presidency,  was  intensely  loyal  to  the  Union. 
He  was  a  member  of  the  executive  committee  of  the 
fair;  and  he  gave  a  thousand  dollars  in  gold.  With 
his  habitual  shrewdness  he  saw  to  it  that  this  gift 
should  be  as  profitable  as  possible.  He  asked  Mr. 
Tiffany  to  send  it  to  Paris  and  to  expend  it  in  the 
articles  most  likely  to  be  salable  at  the  fair;  and 
then  he  arranged  —  that  is,  I  remember  that  he 
tried  to  do  so,  and  I  believe  that  he  succeeded  — 
he  arranged  with  the  Secretary  of  the  Treasury  to 
admit  these  articles  free  of  duty,  with  the  result 
that  his  thousand  dollars  in  gold  brought  into  the 
coffers  of  the  Sanitary  Commission  between  five  and 
ten  thousand  dollars  in  currency. 

The  fair  was  held  in  a  temporary  wooden  building 
in  14th  Street,  just  east  of  Sixth  Avenue,  and  it 


62  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

had' an  annex  on  the  north  side  of  Union  Square  in 
another  wooden  building  connected  with  the  square, 
the  gates  of  which  were  kept  closed  while  the  fair 
was  open.  And  every  night  in  the  fountain  in  the 
square  a  strange  spectral  figure  could  be  seen  —  for 
an  extra  fee;  this  was  the  illusion  then  recently 
devised  in  England,  where  it  was  known  as  "Pep- 
per's Ghost."  One  of  the  attractions  of  the  fair 
was  a  beautiful  sword,  with  its  ornate  scabbard,  to 
be  presented  to  the  Union  general  who  should  re- 
ceive the  most  votes,  costing  a  dollar  each.  There 
was  a  close  contest  between  General  Grant  and 
General  McClellan,  who  had  a  large  following  here 
in  New  York,  especially  among  those  who  held  that 
the  war  was  a  failure.  On  the  last  evening  that  the 
books  were  open  in  which  every  voter  had  to  in- 
scribe his  name  as  he  recorded  his  choice,  the  excite- 
ment was  most  intense,  since  the  two  leading  can- 
didates were  almost  neck  and  neck.  That  was  the 
evening  when  I  was  taken  to  see  the  war-dances  of 
a  group  of  Indians  who  had  been  brought  east  as 
an  added  allurement;  and  I  was  allowed  to  spend  a 
hoarded  dollar  of  my  pocket-money  on  a  vote  for 
the  sword.  As  I  signed  my  name  the  bystanders 
leaned  forward  to  see  who  was  candidate  of  my 
choice.  When  I  wrote  "Grant"  in  the  proper 
column  a  disgusted  admirer  of  General  McClellan 
growled  out:  "What  will  you  be  when  you  grow 
up?"  I  was  only  twelve,  but  I  had  imbibed  the 
loyal  spirit  of  our  household,  and  I  promptly  re- 
sponded: "I  won't  be  a  copperhead  anyhow !" 
My  stay  at  Charlier's  lasted  three  years,  until  I 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  63 

was  fourteen;  and  then  my  school-days  came  to  an 
end.  As  I  look  back  now  over  my  education  at 
Anthon's  and  Churchill's  and  Charlier's  I  cannot 
recall  any  really  stimulating  teacher,  any  instructor 
who  evoked  in  me  the  desire  to  do  my  best.  My 
father  had  tried  to  choose  good  schools  for  me,  and 
it  may  be  that  these  three  were  among  the  best 
private  schools  for  boys  then  existing  in  or  near 
New  York.  If  this  was  the  case,  there  was  at  that 
time  in  this  region  no  school  for  boys  as  good  as  the 
school  for  girls  which  my  mother  had  attended  a 
quarter  of  a  century  earlier.  And  if  I  may  judge  by 
a  recent  visit  to  a  boys'  high  school,  the  teaching 
to  be  obtained  in  the  best  private  schools  of  New 
York  fifty  years  ago  was  far  inferior  to  that  now  to 
be  had  in  the  public  schools  —  inferior  not  only  in 
the  range  of  studies,  but  also  and  more  especially 
in  the  quality  of  the  teaching. 

Ill 

In  the  summer  of  1866  my  father  took  his  family 
over  to  Europe  to  stay  nearly  a  year  and  a  half. 
We  made  the  voyage  out  on  the  Scotia,  then  the 
greyhound  of  the  Atlantic,  in  which  I  was  to  make 
two  later  crossings,  and  which  I  was  to  behold  for 
the  last  time,  in  1900  at  Gibraltar,  degraded  into  a 
coal-hulk,  and  reminding  me  of  a  worn-out  race- 
horse reduced  to  drawing  an  ash-cart.  The  Scotia 
was  commanded  by  Captain  Judkins,  who  was  be- 
lieved to  be  an  excellent  sailor,  and  who  was  known 
to  be  an  exasperating  shipmate  because  of  his  brusk- 


64  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

ness  and  bad  manners.  To  one  lady  who  asked  him 
if  it  was  always  foggy  off  the  Banks,  he  responded 
gruffly:  "How  do  I  know?  I  don't  live  there." 
To  another  lady  who  made  some  other  inquiry  of 
a  similar  kind,  he  snorted  out  a  curt  "Ask  the 
cook  ! "  To  which  the  fair  inquirer  suavely  returned : 
"I  beg  your  pardon,  but  am  I  not  speaking  to  the 
cook?" 

Captain  Judkins  not  only  treated  his  passengers 
with  scant  courtesy,  he  took  an  attitude  equally 
domineering  with  his  fellow  captains  in  command 
of  other  ships,  and  as  a  result  of  this  arbitrary  dis- 
regard of  the  rights  of  other  men  he  came  very  near 
causing  the  loss  of  the  Scotia  on  this  July  voyage,  in 
1866,  as  I  can  testify.  When  we  were  skirting  the 
coast  of  Ireland  and  making  ready  to  enter  the 
harbor  of  Queenstown,  another  ship  unexpectedly 
steamed  out  from  behind  the  headlands.  By  the 
rule  of  the  sea  it  was  the  plain  duty  of  our  boat  to 
swing  to  the  right  and  to  leave  sea-room  between 
us  and  the  rocky  shore.  But  Captain  Judkins  blew 
his  whistle  sharply  and  went  on  unswervingly, 
heading  to  the  left.  The  captain  of  the  outgoing 
vessel,  secure  in  his  rights,  blew  his  whistle  to  warn 
us  and  kept  on  his  course.  As  a  result  of  Captain 
Judkins's  wilful  obstinacy  the  two  boats  were  for 
several  minutes  headed  straight  for  each  other.  A 
collision  seemed  to  be  almost  unavoidable.  I  hap- 
pened to  be  standing  in  the  bow,  and  I  can  hear 
again  the  shrieks  of  a  few  of  the  more  timorous 
passengers  on  the  upper  deck  behind  me.  With 
the  stolidity  of  a  healthy  boy  I  did  not  realize  the 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  65 

danger,  altho  I  could  not  help  seeing  it;  yet  I  think 
I  was  dimly  conscious  of  the  Vision  of  Sudden 
Death.  Suddenly  Captain  Judkins  changed  his 
mind  and  turned  the  Scotia  to  the  right  into  her 
proper  course,  and  a  minute  or  two  later  the  out- 
ward-bound ship  passed  us  within  two  or  three  hun- 
dred feet. 

French  I  had  begun  to  speak  (after  a  fashion)  at 
Charlier's;  and  to  German  I  was  introduced  on 
the  Scotia  the  first  day  out.  As  we  intended  to  be 
absent  for  more  than  a  year,  my  father  had  engaged, 
as  a  tutor  for  me,  Charles  Carroll,  who  had  been  a 
classmate  of  President  Eliot's  at  Harvard,  and  who 
was  afterward  professor  of  modern  languages  at 
New  York  University.  Carroll  was  a  clever  man, 
well  read,  abundant  and  apt  in  anecdote,  an  admira- 
ble elocutionist,  and  unusually  well  equipped  to 
impart  instruction  in  German  and  in  Italian,  as 
well  as  in  French.  For  some  reason,  he  did  not 
take  his  duties  toward  me  very  seriously;  not  that 
he  neglected  me,  but  rather  that  his  responsibility 
for  me  was  subordinate  to  his  own  incessant  effort 
for  mastery  over  rebellious  foreign  tongues.  To  his 
mind  the  whole  duty  of  man  was  summed  up  in  the 
replenishment  of  vocabulary,  the  conquest  of  idiom, 
and  the  acquisition  of  accent.  I  was  present  at  a 
linguistic  triumph  which  filled  his  soul  with  exultant 
joy.  When  we  were  in  Lucerne,  a  little  later  that 
summer,  he  took  me  up  the  Rigi  on  horseback,  the 
railroad  not  having  yet  been  planned.  On  the  ascent 
we  fell  into  company  with  a  lady  and  her  daughter, 
also  on  horseback.  She  made  some  inquiry  about 


66  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

the  hotel  at  the  Kulm,  and  as  she  used  German, 
Carroll  continued  the  conversation  in  that  language. 
Hearing  him  speak  to  me  in  English,  she  changed 
the  talk  to  English.  Then  some  French  phrase, 
accidentally  used,  caused  them  to  drop  into  French. 
Finally  I  heard  them  conversing  in  Italian.  Then 
she  looked  at  Carroll  and  at  me.  :<Your  young 
friend,"  she  said,  "is  English,  of  course,  or  American. 
But  you  ?  What  are  you  ?  I  am  a  Swiss,  daughter 
of  a  hotel-keeper,  wife  of  a  hotel-keeper,  and  I  have 
to  speak  German  and  French,  Italian  and  English. 
Now,  I  have  heard  you  use  all  four  of  those  lan- 
guages and  I  haven't  the  slightest  idea  which  is  your 
native  speech." 

It  was  quite  like  Carroll  not  to  enlighten  her,  and 
to  leave  her  guessing  as  to  his  nativity.  From  him, 
during  the  six  or  eight  months  that  he  remained 
with  us,  I  picked  up  the  rudiments  of  German  and 
of  Italian;  and  in  the  course  of  our  sojourn  in  Ger- 
many and  in  Italy  during  the  next  few  months,  I 
acquired  the  simple  vocabulary  which  enabled  me 
to  serve  as  interpreter  for  my  father  in  the  curiosity- 
shops  of  Venice  and  of  Vienna.  On  later  visits  I 
have  discovered  that  I  can  still  command  a  few  of 
the  most  necessary  vocables,  enough  to  buy  my 
tickets  and  to  order  a  meal.  Yet  my  personal 
control  even  over  this  elementary  vocabulary  is 
not  indisputable,  as  I  discovered  on  my  last  visit 
to  Venice,  when  what  I  wanted  was  cold  milk, 
latte  freddo,  and  what  I  asked  for  was  a  warm  bed, 
letto  caldo. 

The  Scotia  landed  us  at  last  in  Liverpool;  and  we 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  67 

spent  a  few  days  in  London.  Carroll  took  me  on 
the  regular  round  of  sightseeing;  and  he  also  re- 
galed me  with  a  morning  performance  at  the  Al- 
hambra,  where  I  first  beheld  the  daring  and  grace- 
ful performance  of  Leotard  on  the  flying  trapeze 
which  he  had  invented.  From  London  we  went  to 
Paris,  then  to  Switzerland,  where  my  father  took 
a  cure  at  Baden,  a  quaint  little  town  nestling  in 
an  elbow  of  the  Limmat.  From  Switzerland  we 
went  north  into  Germany,  then  in  the  throes  of  the 
Seven  Weeks'  War  between  Prussia  and  Austria. 
We  were  in  Homburg,  in  Nassau,  when  the  Prussian 
troops  marched  in  and  took  possession.  It  was  a 
peaceful,  or  at  least  an  unresisted,  invasion;  and 
the  sole  memory  it  has  left  me  is  that  one  afternoon 
on  the  outskirts  of  Homburg  our  carriage  had  to  be 
drawn  on  one  side  of  the  road  out  of  the  way  of  a 
regiment  of  Prussian  soldiers,  marching  at  ease  and 
singing  'TJpidee-Upida.' 

The  bloodless  capture  of  Homburg  did  not  in 
any  way  interfere  with  the  amusements  of  that 
fashionable  summer  resort,  for  the  gambling  rooms 
were  open  every  night  and  every  afternoon.  I  was 
only  fourteen,  but  I  was  tall  for  my  years;  and  my 
father  never  checked  me  from  wandering  all  over 
the  Kursaal.  I  listened  to  the  music;  I  inspected 
the  polyglot  crowds;  and  I  watched  with  unfailing 
fascination  the  varying  expressions  of  the  gamblers 
who  thronged  about  the  roulette  and  the  trente-et- 
quarante  tables.  I  used  to  stand  just  on  the  outer 
fringe  of  the  players  and  plan  what  I  would  do 
next  if  I  were  playing.  Oddly  enough,  I  was  never 


68  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

tempted  to  play;  I  suppose  I  inherited  my  father's 
distaste  for  "speculation,"  for  the  winning  or  losing 
of  money  by  blind  luck.  I  came  in  time  to  know 
the  names  of  a  few  of  the  steady  players,  those  who 
arrived  when  the  tables  were  uncovered,  and  whom  I 
left  still  hard  at  work  when  I  went  back  to  the  hotel. 

The  one  face  I  can  recapture  is  that  of  a  brother 
of  the  Khedive  of  Egypt,  who  came  in  nearly  every 
afternoon  at  about  the  same  hour,  accompanied  by 
two  aides  in  uniform.  He  wore  the  fez  above  his 
dark,  sullen,  imperturbable  features.  A  seat  would 
be  found  for  him  at  the  roulette  table  and  he  would 
settle  himself  squarely,  with  the  two  aides  immedi- 
ately behind  his  chair.  Then,  without  a  word  or  a 
turn  of  the  head,  he  would  raise  his  right  hand  up 
to  his  shoulder,  and  the  aide  on  that  side  would  give 
him  a  black  portfolio  filled  with  thousand-franc 
notes.  When  he  had  staked  all  these  notes  and 
lost  them,  he  would  raise  his  left  hand  up  to  his 
shoulder,  again  without  a  word  or  a  turn  of  the 
head;  and  the  aide  on  that  side  would  give  him  a 
second  portfolio,  also  filled  with  thousand-franc 
notes,  which  might  soon  go  the  way  of  their  pred- 
ecessors in  the  first  portfolio.  Of  course  this  stolid 
and  gloomy  Turk  must  have  had  his  winning  days; 
but  I  was  never  present  when  he  did  not  lose. 

Nor  was  my  ardent  observation  of  the  gambling 
table  confined  to  Homburg.  In  that  s&me  summer 
of  1866,  we  spent  a  warm  week  in  Baden-Baden. 
We  must  have  visited  this  famous  watering-place 
when  it  was  most  famous,  or  at  all  events  before 
its  fame  had  begun  to  fade.  It  was  the  favorite 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  69 

summer  resort  of  the  fast  and  fashionable  folk  of 
Paris.  In  Baden-Baden,  as  at  Homburg,  I  think  I 
enjoyed  the  walks  and  the  drives  in  the  environ- 
ing woods  almost  as  much  as  I  did  my  vicarious 
gambling.  I  was  already  beginning  to  observe  hu- 
manity, not  only  those  bound  to  the  wheel  of  for- 
tune, but  those  who  came  only  to  look  on  at  the 
gambling,  to  go  out  to  the  races,  to  see  and  to  be 
seen.  I  recall  that  the  Russians  were  almost  if  not 
quite  as  numerous  as  the  Americans.  A  few  years 
later,  when  I  first  read  'Smoke,'  I  was  delighted  to 
discover  that  Turgenieff  had  chosen  the  very  year 
of  my  visit  for  the  opening  episode  of  his  veracious 
and  appealing  study  from  life;  and  as  I  ran  thru 
the  early  pages  my  memory  supplied  the  landscape 
with  figures  that  could  most  exactly  illustrate  this 
masterpiece  of  nineteenth-century  fiction. 

IV 

Late  in  the  autumn  of  1866  we  went  down  to 
Italy;  we  spent  Christmas  in  Florence;  and  we 
arrived  in  Rome  to  pass  the  first  two  or  three  months 
of  the  new  year.  Our  hotel  was  not  far  from  the 
Piazza,  del  Popolo,  within  ear-shot  of  the  barracks 
sheltering  a  regiment  of  the  French  garrison,  which 
held  Rome  for  the  Pope;  and  two  or  three  times  a 
day  the  echo  of  their  bugles  floated  down  to  us. 
There  were  not  a  few  old  friends  of  our  family  in 
Rome  that  winter,  of  whom  I  most  distinctly  recall 
the  distinguished  figure  of  Townsend  Harris,  maker 
of  the  treaty  which  opened  to  the  world  the  island 


70  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

kingdom  of  Japan.  To  these  American  friends  were 
soon  added  Italian  acquaintances,  including  a  cer- 
tain Prince  Massimo,  a  member  of  a  family  so  old 
that  it  claimed  to  derive  its  descent  and  even  its 
name  from  a  Pontifex  Maximus  of  the  second  or 
third  century.  This  kindly  old  gentleman  lingers 
in  my  memory  as  the  first  prince  I  had  ever  spoken 
to.  He  came  to  our  balcony  during  the  last  days  of 
the  carnival,  when  the  maskers  were  throwing  bou- 
quets and  scattering  confetti,  and  when  the  horses 
were  loosed  for  their  mad  dash  down  the  Corso, 
thickly  lined  with  commingled  citizens  and  sight- 
seers. On  the  final  evening  after  the  last  of  the 
moccoletti  had  burned  itself  out,  my  father  smilingly 
told  us  that  the  prince  had  asked  him  if  he  did  not 
care  to  have  a  title,  baron  or  count,  explaining  that 
its  acquisition  would  be  a  simple  matter,  since  all 
that  my  father  would  have  to  do  would  be  to  give 
a  hundred  thousand  lire  or  so  to  some  hospital, 
whereupon  the  Pope,  in  recognition  of  this  gift, 
would  be  glad  to  grant  a  patent  of  nobility. 

Another  balcony  than  ours  attracted  my  atten- 
tion during  those  carnival  days  —  that  of  the  de- 
throned sovereigns  of  Naples;  and  I  took  a  juvenile 
pleasure  in  gazing  up  at  the  young  Queen  turned  out 
of  her  kingdom,  a  beautiful  sister  of  the  beautiful 
Empress  of  Austria.  I  think  we  also  beheld  the 
royal  exiles  more  than  once  when  we  drove  out  on 
the  desolate  campagna  to  see  the  hounds  meet,  not 
far  from  the  tomb  of  Cecelia  Metella  —  where 
Locker-Lampson  tells  us  in  rime  he  had  "left  his 
umbrella."  With  my  parents  I  went  to  the  work- 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  71 

shops  of  the  Vatican,  which  were  then  engaged  in 
finishing  the  interminable  series  of  portraits  of  the 
Popes  to  fill  the  two  or  three  still  empty  panels  high 
up  on  the  walls  of  St.  John  Lateran.  I  was  taken 
also  to  Castellani's  to  see  his  Etruscan  finds,  and 
his  own  lovely  reproductions  and  restorations.  And 
there  were  visits  also  to  the  studios  of  various  paint- 
ers and  sculptors,  American  and  Italian  —  the  only 
one  of  which  that  I  can  now  recall  with  certainty 
being  that  of  W.  W.  Story. 

The  American  sculptor-poet,  as  he  was  then 
termed,  was  finishing  the  model  of  a  'Delilah,' 
which  so  pleased  my  father  that  he  purchased  it. 
I  feel  called  upon  to  register,  in  these  frank  and 
artless  confessions,  the  fact  that  this  statue  evoked 
my  earliest  effort  at  esthetic  criticism,  as  pettily 
pedantic  —  in  despite  of  my  juvenility  —  as  any  of 
which  I  was  ever  to  be  guilty  in  my  later  years. 
Story  had  chosen  for  his  statue  the  moment  after 
Delilah  had  shorn  Samson  of  his  luxurious  locks; 
and  in  the  model  the  strength-giving  tresses  lay  at 
her  feet  by  the  side  of  the  scissors  with  which  she 
had  done  the  deed  of  treachery.  With  the  brisk 
assurance  of  a  youth  of  scant  fifteen,  I  asked  the 
sculptor  if  he  was  certain  that  the  Hebrews  had 
scissors  in  the  days  of  the  Judges.  A  sudden  ex- 
pression of  doubt  came  into  his  face  as  he  looked 
down  at  me,  and  he  hesitated  a  moment  before  he 
answered:  "I  think  they  did  have  scissors  then  — 
but  I'm  not  at  all  sure.  Perhaps  it  will  be  safer  to 
change  that  pair  of  scissors  into  a  razor.  I  know 
that  they  had  razors  at  that  time." 


72  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

While  we  were  in  Rome  that  winter  my  instinct 
for  collecting,  inherited  probably  from  my  father, 
who  delighted  in  gathering  beautiful  objects  in  all 
the  departments  of  art,  and  not  sated  by  my  child- 
ish efforts  in  New  York  to  form  a  collection  of 
postage-stamps,  took  a  new  turn;  I  was  tempted 
by  the  constantly  proffered  results  of  incessant  ex- 
cavations to  spend  most  of  my  very  liberal  pocket- 
money  in  the  accumulation  of  the  bronze  coins 
of  Rome,  republican,  imperial,  and  papal.  I  aspired 
most  ardently  to  complete  a  set  of  the  smaller 
silver  coins  with  the  images  and  superscriptions 
of  the  Twelve  Caesars.  As  a  result  of  my  re- 
searches I  aroused  an  interest  in  Roman  history 
which  has  survived  half  a  century  as  a  source  of 
enduring  pleasure;  and  I  also  made  what  I  believed 
to  be  a  discovery.  I  knew  that  in  adopting  its 
system  of  decimal  coinage  the  French  republic  had 
followed  the  example  of  the  American  republic; 
and  I  now  found  out  that  the  Roman  scudo,  with  its 
ten  pauls  each  worth  ten  baioccos,  had  come  into 
existence  before  our  dollar,  with  its  ten  dimes  each 
worth  ten  cents,  and  that  therefore  the  Papal 
States  had  anticipated  the  United  States  in  devising 
a  scientific  and  labor-saving  system  of  measuring 
pecuniary  values. 

I  was  moved  to  write  a  little  article  to  set  forth 
the  facts  I  had  found  out;  and  my  father  sent  this 
to  New  York  and  had  it  printed  in  a  newspaper, 
paying  me  ten  dollars  for  it.  So  it  was  that  I  made 
my  first  appearance  in  type  when  I  was  only  fifteen. 
I  think  that  the  article  did  not  get  into  print  until 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  73 

after  we  had  left  Rome  for  Naples,  and  perhaps 
not  until  after  we  had  gone  north  thru  Venice  (still 
in  the  hands  of  the  Austrians)  to  Vienna,  where  we 
arrived  in  a  spring  snow-storm.  And  it  was  early 
in  the  spring  that  we  returned  to  Paris,  where  the 
Exposition  was  about  to  open. 


My  father  had  taken  a  house  in  Paris,  in  the  Rue 
de  la  Baume,  a  quiet  offshoot  of  the  Faubourg  St. 
Honore.  The  house  belonged  to  a  Prince  Trou- 
betzkoi;  and  it  stood,  as  the  French  phrase  has  it, 
"between  court  and  garden,"  that  is  to  say,  there 
was  a  spacious  courtyard  in  front  for  carriages  to 
drive  in,  and  there  was  an  exiguous  garden  of  half 
an  acre  in  the  rear  of  the  house,  with  a  few  shrubs 
and  a  dozen  towering  old  trees.  The  ground  floor 
contained  a  suite  of  rooms  for  entertaining,  leading 
up  to  a  superbly  spacious  music-room;  but  on  the 
floor  above  there  was  only  one  decent  bedroom,  all 
the  others  being  scarcely  larger  than  closets.  But 
there  was  a  large  stable;  and  my  father  sent  to  New 
York  for  the  four-in-hand  of  beautifully  matched 
Kentucky  horses  which  he  drove  with  assured  skill. 

The  year  1867  saw  the  culmination  of  the  spec- 
tacular splendor  of  the  inglorious  Second  Empire;  it 
saw  also  the  downfall  of  the  Mexican  Empire,  which 
Napoleon  had  started  when  the  United  States  was 
otherwise  occupied.  The  American  colony  had  ar- 
ranged to  have  an  unusually  elaborate  celebration 
of  the  Fourth  of  July,  and  the  Pre  Catalan  had  been 


74  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

engaged  to  serve  as  the  rural  frame  of  our  festivities. 
My  father  was  on  the  committee  of  arrangements; 
and  as  his  deputy  I  had  been  in  negotiation  with 
the  most  accomplished  of  the  manipulators  of  mar- 
ionettes in  the  theaters  in  the  Champs  Ely  sees. 
Then  came  the  startling  news  of  the  capture  of 
Maximilian,  and  of  his  summary  execution  at 
Queretaro.  The  imperial  court  went  into  mourn- 
ing, and  all  festivities  were  suspended  for  a  brief 
season.  John  Bigelow,  then  the  American  min- 
ister, received  a  hint  that  it  would  be  taken  as  an 
act  of  considerate  courtesy  if  we  were  to  forego 
our  Fourth  of  July  celebration,  and  to  my  regret 
I  had  to  go  to  the  Champs  Elysees  to  notify  Anatole, 
le  vrai  guignol,  that  his  services  would  not  be  re- 
quired by  us.  As  some  compensation  for  this  dis- 
appointment, I  persuaded  him  to  copy  out  for  me 
for  a  modest  reward  half-a-dozen  of  the  master- 
pieces of  his  comic  repertory;  and  this  precious 
manuscript,  in  all  the  effulgence  of  its  simplified 
spelling,  is  now  preserved  in  the  Dramatic  Museum 
of  Columbia  University. 

All  that  summer  Paris  was  an  Inn  of  Strange 
Meetings;  and  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men 
passed  before  my  boyish  gaze.  One  afternoon 
Buchanan  Read  dropped  in  for  a  chat  with  my 
mother.  I  knew  that  he  had  painted  her  portrait 
ten  years  earlier,  but  I  knew  also  that  he  had  since 
written  'Sheridan's  Ride/  a  far  more  interesting 
production  to  a  boy  who  had  lived  thru  the  war 
than  any  family  portrait  could  then  be.  He  was 
the  first  poet  who  had  ever  spoken  to  me,  as  the 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  75 

descendant  of  the  Pontifex  Maximus  was  the  first 
prince.  He  seemed  to  me  simple,  gentle,  and  kindly, 
and  when  my  mother  told  him  that  I  was  collecting 
autographs,  he  sat  down  at  the  library  table  and 
wrote  out  from  memory  one  of  his  poems  —  not 
'Sheridan's  Ride,'  as  I  had  hoped,  but  his  own 
favorite  lyric,  'Drifting': 

"My  soul  to-day 

Is  far  away, 
Sailing  the  Vesuvian  Bay; 

My  winged  boat, 

A  bird  afloat, 
Swings  round  the  purple  peaks  remote." 

Altho  my  mother  had  given  up  singing  herself, 
she  retained  her  liking  for  music;  and  the  spacious 
music-room  that  Prince  Troubetzkoi  had  built  for 
himself  was  often  put  to  its  proper  purpose  when 
our  house  was  gladdened  by  a  visit  from  one  or 
another  of  the  three  rival  American  amateur  singers 
then  vying  with  one  another  in  Paris  —  Miss  Fanny 
Reed,  Mrs.  Ronalds,  and  Mrs.  Charles  Moulton  (now 
Mme.  Hegermann  Lindencrone) .  I  was  taken  to 
the  Lyrique  to  hear  Mme.  Carvalho  in  'Faust,'  and 
to  the  Opera-Comique  to  hear  Galli-Marie  in 
'Mignon,'  both  of  these  operas  then  in  the  freshness 
of  their  novelty.  I  saw  the  walls  of  Paris  plastered 
with  staring  portraits  of  the  elder  Sothern  as  Lord 
Dundreary,  with  his  weeping  whiskers  and  his  single 
eye-glass;  and  I  was  taken  to  the  Theatre  Italien 
to  enjoy  the  encounter  between  Dundreary  and 
Asa  Trenchard,  most  humorously  and  most  pa- 


76  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

thetically  impersonated  by  John  T.  Raymond.  I 
saw  also  the  glittering  spectacles  of  'Cendrillon' 
(with  its  twinkling  torchlight  procession)  at  the 
Chatelet,  and  of  the  'Biche  au  Bois'  at  the  Porte 
St.  Martin  (with  a  thin  slip  of  a  girl  in  a  part 
of  no  significance,  Sarah-Bernhardt) .  I  was  per- 
mitted to  be  a  spectator  of  both  of  the  triumphant 
successes  of  the  superabundantly  successful  Sardou, 
the  'Famille  Benoiton'  at  the  Vaudeville  (then  in 
its  old  home  near  the  Bourse),  and  cNos  Bons  Vil- 
lageois'  at  the  Gymnase.  And  I  have  an  unfor- 
gettable memory  of  my  first  visit  to  the  Theatre 
Francais,  where  I  had  the  delight  of  beholding  De- 
launay  and  Favart  and  Got  in  Musset's  'On  ne 
badine  pas  avec  1'amour ' ;  and  to  this  day  I  can  hear 
again  the  wail  of  Mile.  Favart  as  she  spoke  the  final 
words  which  separate  her  forever  from  her  lover: 
"Adieu,  Perdican !  elle  est  morte." 

One  afternoon,  probably  by  the  courtesy  of  Mr. 
Bigelow,  we  were  permitted  to  attend  a  sitting  of 
the  Corps  Legislatif;  and  by  good  luck  we  had  the 
absolutely  unexpected  experience  of  seeing  Thiers, 
then  the  leader  of  the  little  knot  of  the  opposition, 
rise  suddenly  and  make  his  way  to  the  tribune, 
where  he  unsparingly  denounced  the  policies  of  the 
empire,  both  civil  and  military.  Altho  we  could  not 
foresee  it,  that  fiery  speech  of  Thiers,  delivered  at 
the  time  of  the  Mexican  disasters,  really  sounded 
the  knell  of  Napoleon.  But  in  those  mid-months 
of  1867  a  knell  could  scarcely  have  made  itself 
heard  above  the  deafening  tintinnabulation  of  the 
joy -bells  ringing  out  loudly  day  after  day,  and  night 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  77 

after  night.  There  was  incessant  entertaining  on 
an  extravagantly  luxurious  scale,  not  only  by  the 
imperial  circle,  but  also  by  all  the  several  foreign 
colonies.  One  evening  my  father  and  my  mother 
went  out  to  a  big  dinner,  going  on  afterward  to  two 
receptions,  and  finally  spending  an  hour  or  more 
at  a  ball;  and  it  was  between  three  and  four  in  the 
morning  when  they  got  into  the  carriage,  whereupon 
the  groom  touched  his  hat  and  asked:  "Where  now, 
madame?" 


VI 

Of  course  these  nocturnal  dissipations  were  denied 
to  my  tender  years;  and  in  compensation  I  had  my 
diurnal  visits  to  the  Exposition  itself,  my  father 
having  presented  me  with  a  season  ticket,  authen- 
ticated by  my  photograph.  Altho  far  surpassed  in 
size  by  later  international  fairs,  the  Paris  Exposition 
of  1867  has  never  been  equalled  in  the  convenience 
of  its  arrangements.  It  was  held  in  the  Champs  de 
Mars;  and  the  main  building  was  most  ingeniously 
composed  of  concentric  oval  galleries  of  iron  and 
glass  surrounding  a  garden.  The  inner  hall  which 
opened  on  this  lovely  example  of  urban  garden- 
craft  was  given  up  to  the  fine  arts,  while  every  suc- 
ceeding outer  ring  was  devoted  to  a  separate  de- 
partment of  human  achievement,  the  lofty  outer 
gallery  containing  machinery  in  motion.  This  dis- 
tribution made  it  easy  for  any  one  who  wished  to 
examine  all  the  exhibits  of  the  same  kind  to  ac- 
complish this  without  being  distracted  by  any- 


78  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

thilig  else.  While  the  several  departments  had  each 
its  annular  hall,  the  several  nations  occupied  sec- 
tions more  or  less  triangular  (like  pieces  of  pie)  ex- 
tending from  the  center  of  the  ellipse  to  the  periph- 
ery thereof,  so  that  those  who  wanted  to  see  all 
that  any  one  country  had  to  show  walked  not  in  a 
circle,  but  straight  thru  from  the  outer  ring  to  the 
inner. 

Left  to  my  own  devices  by  the  departure  of 
Carroll,  I  was  diligent  in  my  attendance  at  the 
Exposition;  and  after  looking  up  all  the  exhibits 
that  I  thought  would  be  amusing,  I  determined  to 
leave  nothing  unseen,  so  I  conscientiously  paced 
every  alleyway,  indoors  and  out.  Generally  I  went 
alone,  but  I  was  sometimes  accompanied  by  my 
schoolmate  at  Charlier's,  Francis  S.  Saltus  (later  to 
make  himself  known  as  a  poet).  Once  when  we 
were  passing  an  Algerian  restaurant,  the  monotonous 
strumming  within  allured  us  to  climb  a  spiral  stair- 
case. At  the  top  we  beheld  only  a  bare  room  with 
two  musicians  impassively  striking  their  primitive 
instruments;  and  as  we  could  detect  nothing  likely 
to  reward  us,  we  immediately  corkscrewed  down  the 
stairs,  only  to  be  stopped  by  the  guardian  below 
when  the  alert  manager  shouted  down:  "They 
haven't  taken  anything"  —  "Ces  messieurs  n'ont  pas 
consomme."  So  we  were  held  to  ransom  for  the 
consummation  devoutly  unwished. 

The  culmination  of  the  Exposition  was  the  day 
when  the  prizes  were  distributed  by  the  Emperor 
in  person.  This  took  place  in  the  Palais  de  Tlndus- 
trie  built  for  the  Exposition  of  1856,  used  later  for 


LATER  SCHOOL-DAYS  79 

the  annual  Salon,  and  torn  down  in  the  final  years 
of  the  nineteenth  century  to  make  room  for  the 
Grand  and  Petit  Palais  of  the  Exposition  of  1900. 
The  spacious  and  sumptuously  decorated  building 
was  filled  with  thousands  of  interested  spectators, 
all  seated  so  that  they  could  see  the  semicircular 
platform  which  tongued  out  from  one  side,  and 
which  was  occupied  by  the  Emperor,  the  Empress, 
the  Prince  Imperial,  and  their  imperial,  royal,  and 
princely  guests.  Either  before  or  after  I  had  gazed 
on  the  Pope  I  had  been  held  up  to  a  window  of  the 
Hotel  Westminster  in  the  Rue  de  la  Paix  to  behold 
the  carriage,  surrounded  by  the  Cent  Gardes  in 
their  resplendent  cuirasses,  which  was  conveying 
Queen  Victoria,  who  had  just  arrived  in  Paris  to 
pay  a  visit  to  her  ally  of  the  Crimean  War.  But 
it  was  no  single  monarch  I  was  privileged  to  behold 
at  that  distribution  of  prizes;  it  was  two  or  three 
score  of  them,  all  on  exhibition  at  once,  as  large  as 
life  and  quite  as  natural.  A  few  days  later  my 
father  had  occasion  to  visit  Dr.  Evans,  the  Ameri- 
can dentist  (who  was  only  three  years  later  to  be 
the  chief  instrument  in  the  escape  of  the  Empress 
Eugenie  from  the  Tuileries  on  the  night  of  Septem- 
ber 4).  "There  must  have  been  fifty  or  sixty  royal- 
ties on  that  platform,"  said  Dr.  Evans  to  my  father. 
"And  there  were  only  half-a-dozen  that  I  haven't 
had  by  the  nose !" 

It  must  have  been  at  this  time  that  the  Emperor 
held  a  grand  review  at  Longchamps  in  honor  of  the 
visiting  sovereigns.  All  the  garrison  of  Paris  pa- 
raded past  the  grand-stand,  artillery,  cavalry,  infan- 


80  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

try, '  voltigeurs,  zouaves,  turcos,  with  their  several 
companies  of  bearded  sappers,  and  their  sturdy 
vivandieres.  The  climax  of  the  review  was  the  mass- 
ing of  all  the  cavalry,  regiment  after  regiment,  on 
the  opposite  side  of  the  race-course,  to  face  at  last 
toward  the  Emperor,  and  to  charge  at  full  speed 
across  the  plain,  drawing  up  suddenly  right  in  front 
of  the  sovereign,  when  every  saber  flashed  out  in  a 
simultaneous  salute.  On  the  return  from  Long- 
champs  that  afternoon,  as  we  were  just  entering 
the  Bois  de  Boulogne,  our  carriage  was  less  than  a 
hundred  yards  behind  that  which  conveyed  the 
Emperor  of  the  French  and  the  Czar  of  Russia. 
So  it  was  that  we  heard  the  startling  report  of  the 
pistol,  fired  at  the  imperial  carriage.  And  the  anec- 
dote current  at  the  time  reported  that  each  of  the 
monarchs  with  commingled  courtesy  and  self-control 
turned  to  the  other  and  said:  "Don't  be  alarmed; 
that  was  meant  for  me!" 


CHAPTER  V 
PREPARING  FOR  COLLEGE 


IN  November,  1867,  we  returned  to  New  York; 
and  the  question  of  my  more  advanced  educa- 
tion had  to  be  decided.  During  our  stay  in 
Europe  I  had  heard  the  name  of  the  Ecole  Poly- 
technique;  and  for  some  unguessable  reason  I  was 
strangely  attracted  by  it.  Really  I  knew  little  or 
nothing  about  the  far-famed  French  institution  for 
the  training  of  engineers,  and  I  did  not  hear  any 
loud  personal  call  to  the  profession  of  engineering; 
nevertheless,  I  had  got  into  the  habit  of  asserting 
that  I  would  like  to  go  to  the  Ecole  Poly  technique. 
Of  course  I  realize  now  that  this  boyish  desire  was 
absolutely  impossible  for  various  reasons,  one  of 
them  being  that  I  had  no  special  gift  for  mathe- 
matics. Possessed  by  this  vague  aspiration,  my 
thoughts  had  not  turned  toward  any  American 
college. 

When  we  were  settled  again  in  our  New  York 
home,  I  found  that  certain  of  my  old  schoolfellows, 
and  in  particular  Stuyvesant  Fish,  my  roommate 
at  Churchill's,  had  just  entered  Columbia  College 
as  freshmen  in  the  class  of  1871.  And  I  made  up 
my  mind  immediately  that  I  would  like  to  go  to 
Columbia  as  a  member  of  this  class.  But  our  sixteen 
months'  absence  in  Europe  had  deprived  me  of  a 

81 


82  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

year's  regular  schooling;  and  altho,  no  doubt,  it  had 
been  educationally  advantageous  in  many  ways,  it 
had  not  provided  me  with  the  specific  knowledge 
needed  to  enable  me  to  enter  college.  With  his 
customary  kindness  my  father  offered  to  get  me  a 
private  tutor,  so  that  I  might  prepare  myself  to  take 
the  examinations.  During  the  winter  I  was  to 
make  sure  of  the  information  needed  to  enter,  but 
I  was  also  to  cover  as  far  as  possible  the  work  of  the 
freshman  year,  which  my  friends  already  in  college 
were  simultaneously  studying.  With  the  aid  of 
another  tutor  in  the  summer  I  hoped  that  I  could 
fit  myself  to  go  up  to  Columbia  in  the  fall  to  apply 
for  admission  to  the  sophomore  class  in  which  my 
friends  would  then  be. 

What  I  proposed  to  do  was  to  make  up  a  year  of 
preparation,  and  also  to  cover  a  full  year  of  college 
work,  and  to  do  this  in  about  eight  months.  It  was 
not  an  impossible  or  even  a  very  difficult  feat  for  an 
ambitious  lad  of  fifteen,  diligent  in  study,  and  sternly 
resolved  to  accomplish  what  he  had  set  out  to 
achieve.  The  trouble  with  me  was  that  I  was  not 
then  ambitious  or  diligent  or  resolute.  Hitherto  I 
had  taken  life  very  easily,  and  I  simply  did  not  know 
what  hard  work  meant.  I  had  never  learned  how  to 
learn;  and  at  no  one  of  the  schools  I  had  attended 
had  I  come  under  the  influence  of  a  born  teacher 
who  might  have  awakened  my  aspirations  and  roused 
me  out  of  my  happy-go-lucky  cheerfulness.  And  as 
a  result  of  this  I  did  not  take  my  new  task  seriously. 
I  had  an  unhesitating  confidence  that  all  would  go 
well  somehow. 


PREPARING  FOR  COLLEGE  83 

I  knew  that  I  was  "quick"  and  "clever,"  that  I 
was  considered  to  be  a  "bright"  boy;  and  I  did  not 
suspect  that  this  was  an  immense  disadvantage, 
since  it  tended  irresistibly  toward  superficiality.  I 
was  alert,  and  I  easily  acquired  the  outlines  of  any- 
thing I  attacked;  but  I  never  mastered  it  thoroly; 
and  I  did  not  attack  anything  with  genuine  ardor. 
I  had  no  training,  no  discipline,  no  power  to  compel 
myself  to  stick  to  any  one  thing  until  I  had  got  the 
utmost  out  of  it.  I  was  very  easy-going  with  myself; 
and  I  had  never  been  toughened  by  a  hard  tussle 
with  anything  that  seemed  to  me  worth  while. 
The  deficiencies  that  I  did  not  suspect  when  I  was 
fifteen  I  discovered  before  I  was  twenty-five;  and 
the  training  I  failed  to  get  from  any  teacher  in  my 
boyhood  I  had  to  get  for  myself  after  I  had  come  to 
man's  estate;  and  then  it  was  not  got  without 
difficulty,  since  I  had  no  habit  of  application  to  help 
me  in  overcoming  my  own  inertia.  But  when  a 
man  is  his  own  master  he  can  be  the  hardest  of  task- 
masters. My  change  of  heart  was  brought  about 
by  my  awakening  to  the  painful  fact  that  so-called 
quickness  and  cleverness  and  brightness  were  pretty 
poor  substitutes  for  thoroness  —  and  that,  like  other 
substitutes,  they  were  often  only  bounty -jumpers. 
I  found  out  when  I  came  to  measure  myself  with 
others  that  superficial  smattering  was  not  a  precious 
possession,  and  that  honest  labor  was  its  own  reward. 

What  I  most  needed  to  make  up  was  Latin,  Greek, 
and  mathematics,  studies  entirely  neglected  in  Europe 
even  while  Carroll  was  with  us.  My  father  engaged 
an  elderly  Scotsman  named  Henderson  to  give  me 


84  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

lessons  in  these  subjects,  wherein  I  had  fallen  be- 
hind. I  had  had  Henderson  as  my  classical  teacher 
three  years  before  at  Charlier's,  where  he  was  still 
engaged.  As  his  morning  hours  were  thus  occupied 
he  could  come  to  me  only  in  the  evening.  I  was 
supposed  to  study  in  the  forenoon  and  to  recite  to 
him  every  night  what  I  might  have  learned.  There 
was  a  large  room  in  the  basement  of  our  house, 
originally  intended  for  a  breakfast-room,  and  this 
was  assigned  to  me  as  a  study.  It  had  two  large 
closets;  and  in  one  of  these  a  sneak-thief  once  con- 
cealed himself  just  before  Henderson  and  I  came 
down  to  our  evening  labors.  After  my  lesson  was 
over  and  Mr.  Henderson  had  departed,  the  thief 
went  up-stairs  to  my  mother's  bedroom  and  helped 
himself  to  her  jewelry.  Then  he  calmly  went  out 
the  front  door  with  his  booty.  We  found  out  later 
that  this  sneak-thief  had  been  prowling  along  Fifth 
Avenue,  probably  with  no  special  design  on  our 
house.  He  had  happened  to  see  a  tradesman's  boy 
coming  out  of  the  basement  door,  and  he  had 
promptly  bidden  the  lad  to  leave  it  open  as  he  had 
a  package  to  deliver.  Once  inside  he  had  investi- 
gated my  study,  and  had  slipped  into  the  closet 
when  he  heard  us  coming  down  for  my  lesson.  And 
in  this  closet  he  had  remained  shut  up  for  nearly 
two  hours,  while  Henderson  and  I  were  indulging 
in  the  quest  of  the  second  aorist.  When  Hender- 
son was  told  about  the  hidden  listener,  he  remarked 
that  the  sneak-thief  had  had  gratuitous  instruction 
in  the  classics.  "If  you  catch  him,  I'll  send  him  my 
bill!" 


PREPARING  FOR  COLLEGE     85 

II 

The  jewelry  stolen  from  my  mother  was  valuable; 
yet  the  sneak-thief  might  have  made  a  more  satis- 
factory haul  if  he  had  been  able  to  get  into  the 
drawing-room  floor,  which  was  a  museum  of  objects 
of  art,  acquired  in  Rome  and  more  especially  in 
Paris,  where  my  father  had  purchased  many  of  the 
most  important  examples  of  goldsmith's  work  pre- 
pared for  the  Exposition.  During  our  absence  the 
house  itself  had  been  in  the  skilful  hands  of  Chris- 
tian Herter  (the  father  of  Mr.  Albert  Herter);  and 
it  was  due  to  Herter's  suggestion  that  my  father 
had  commissioned  Galland  to  paint  eight  exquisite 
panels  for  the  music-room,  four  of  the  Seasons,  and 
four  of  the  Elements,  single  female  figures  floating 
in  the  air,  each  with  a  little  child  playing  on  the 
ground  below.  With  his  innate  dislike  for  make- 
shifts and  second-bests,  my  father  had  ordered  in 
Paris  curtains  of  real  lace  for  the  windows  of  the 
drawing-room  —  an  externally  visible  evidence  of 
taste  which  soon  caused  our  home  to  be  designated 
as  "the  point-lace  house." 

Another  and  more  enduring  testimony  of  his  judg- 
ment is  St.  Bartholomew's  Church.  My  father  had 
been  elected  a  vestryman  when  the  congregation  oc- 
cupied a  bare  and  barn-like  edifice  on  the  corner  of 
Lafayette  Place  and  Great  Jones  Street.  When  the 
movement  up-town  led  to  the  purchase  of  a  new 
site  at  Madison  Avenue  and  44th  Street,  the  vestry- 
men had  almost  accepted  an  empty  and  yet  tawdry 
design  by  a  builder  devoid  of  architectural  training. 


86  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

My  father  in  disgust  went  to  his  old  friend,  James 
Renwick,  the  architect  of  Grace  Church  and  of 
St.  Patrick's  Cathedral,  and  agreed  to  pay  out 
of  his  own  pocket  for  a  more  seemly  design  if  the 
vestry  should  decline  it.  When  Renwick  and  Sands 
had  prepared  the  plans  for  the  present  church,  my 
father  procured  bids  from  responsible  builders,  who 
stood  ready  to  erect  the  more  stately  building  for 
less  money  than  the  tasteless  design  was  estimated  to 
cost.  In  view  of  this  combination  of  art  and  busi- 
ness, the  other  members  of  the  vestry  could  not  but 
see  the  advantage  of  intrusting  the  new  church 
to  the  architects  to  whom  my  father  had  gone. 

My  father's  liking  for  the  best  attainable  was  il- 
lustrated again  in  St.  Bartholomew's  one  morning 
after  we  had  listened  to  a  moving  appeal  for  domestic 
missions.  There  were  cards  in  all  the  pews  with 
pencils  attached,  so  that  the  emotional  response  to 
the  sermon  might  be  immediately  translated  into 
cash.  These  cards  had  separate  spaces  for  Sub- 
scriptions, Donations,  and  for  Annual  Stipends  of 
individual  missionaries,  and  these  stipends  might 
be  for  any  amount  from  five  hundred  dollars  to  a 
thousand.  I  saw  my  father  fill  out  a  card  and  drop 
it  into  the  plate.  On  our  way  home  I  asked  him  what 
he  had  written,  and  he  told  me  that  he  had  made 
himself  responsible  for  a  stipend  for  three  years. 
Then  I  returned  that  these  stipends  were  for  vary- 
ing sums,  whereupon  my  father  smiled.  "If  I  am 
going  to  have  a  personal  representative  as  a  mis- 
sionary on  the  frontier,"  he  said,  "I  want  the  best 
I  can  get." 


PREPARING  FOR  COLLEGE  87 

The  meetings  of  the  vestry  of  St.  Bartholomew's 
were  held  in  the  evening  at  the  houses  of  the  several 
members;  and  when  the  personal  business  had  been 
attended  to,  the  host  of  the  occasion  led  the  way 
to  a  simple  supper.  At  a  gathering  at  the  house  of 
the  vestryman  who  had  been  responsible  for  the 
ugly  design,  and  who  was  also  one  of  the  most  liberal 
contributors  toward  the  cost  of  erecting  the  new 
church,  a  fellow  vestryman,  equally  deficient  in 
esthetic  perception,  made  a  complimentary  remark 
about  the  somewhat  emphatic  decoration  of  the 
dining-room.  'Yes,"  said  the  complacent  host, 
"I've  had  the  entire  house  done  over.  I  asked  who 
was  the  best  decorator  in  New  York,  and  they  told 
me  it  was  an  Italian  named  Gariboldi.  So  I  had 
him  estimate  on  the  whole  job;  and  when  I  got  his 
estimate,  I  told  him  to  go  ahead  and  do  the  best 
he  could  for  half  the  money."  Then  he  waved  his 
hand  in  a  curve  of  complete  satisfaction.  "And 
you  see  the  result !" 

My  father  had  other  and  more  congenial  friends; 
and  of  these  the  one  I  came  to  know  best,  and  to 
like  best,  was  Townsend  Harris.  He  dined  with  us 
every  Sunday;  and  we  often  saw  him  on  the  other 
days  of  the  week.  He  was  a  man  of  the  most  pol- 
ished manners  and  of  infinite  tact;  and  it  was  not 
difficult  to  perceive  the  qualities  which  had  enabled 
him  to  win  the  regard  and  the  confidence  of  the 
suspicious  Japanese.  I  regret  greatly  that  I  cannot 
now  remember  more  of  his  experiences  in  the  East. 
There  was  one  which  he  did  not  like  to  recall  but 
which  I  heard  him  tell  at  least  once.  When  he  had 


88  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

at  last  succeeded  in  persuading  the  Japanese  to  sign 
the  treaty  which  opened  the  island-kingdom  to  citi- 
zens of  the  United  States,  he  carried  out  the  orders 
of  our  government  to  facilitate  the  negotiation  of 
similar  treaties  by  other  powers,  and  before  he  left 
Japan  he  was  instrumental  in  aiding  the  Prussians 
and  the  British  to  make  their  treaties.  In  recogni- 
tion of  his  courtesy  he  received  the  order  of  the 
Black  Eagle  from  Prussia;  and  Queen  Victoria 
wrote  him  an  autograph  letter  of  thanks,  accom- 
panying it  with  a  diamond  snuff-box.  Our  Civil 
War  was  still  raging  when  he  departed  from  Japan; 
and  the  sympathies  of  the  British  in  the  Orient  were 
strongly  in  favor  of  the  South.  So  violent  was  their 
hostility  to  the  United  States  that  the  captain  of  one 
of  the  British  steamers  which  Mr.  Harris  had  to 
take  on  his  return  home,  one  day  chose  to  express 
his  feelings  by  running  up  the  Confederate  flag; 
and  this  outrage  to  a  representative  of  the  American 
people  was  cheered  by  the  British  passengers.  As 
a  result  of  this  insult  Mr.  Harris  never  thereafter 
set  foot  on  British  soil,  or  on  a  British  ship.  When 
we  were  going  to  Europe  he  always  came  down  to 
the  boat  to  see  us  off,  if  we  were  taking  a  French 
or  a  German  line,  but  if  we  had  chosen  a  British 
line  he  would  bid  us  farewell  the  night  before  we 
sailed. 

Mr.  Harris  had  a  keen  sense  of  humor,  and  he 
could  not  only  take  a  joke  on  himself  but  also  tell 
about  it.  During  his  brief  stay  in  China,  before 
going  to  Japan,  he  dined  once  with  a  distinguished 
mandarin;  and  by  some  mishap  the  expected  in- 


PREPARING  FOR  COLLEGE  89 

terpreter  failed  to  appear,  thus  leaving  the  guest  of 
honor  unable  to  tell  his  host  how  much  he  was  en- 
joying the  dinner,  which  was  a  succession  of  delicious 
dishes  unknown  to  Occidental  cookery.  One  of 
these  dishes  was  apparently  a  game  stew,  which  Mr. 
Harris  supposed  to  be  compounded  of  duck;  and 
desiring  to  make  sure  of  this,  he  indicated  by  ex- 
pressive pantomime  that  it  was  most  grateful  to 
his  palate,  and  then  pointing  to  it,  he  uttered  an 
interrogative  "Quack-quack-quack?"  Whereupon 
his  smiling  host  shook  his  head  and  gently  responded : 
"Bow-wow-wow!"  —  thereby  informing  his  guest 
that  they  had  been  feasting  on  the  famous  edible 
dog. 

To  Mr.  Harris,  before  he  went  to  Japan,  was  due 
the  founding  of  the  first  boys'  high  school,  the  Free 
Academy,  now  known  as  the  College  of  the  City  of 
New  York;  and  it  was  a  fitting  recognition  of  his 
foresight  when  the  most  important  of  the  new  build- 
ings of  the  city  college  received  the  name  of  Town- 
send  Harris  Hall.  After  his  return  to  New  York 
he  was  a  constant  frequenter  of  the  Union  Club,  and 
as  he  had  no  liking  for  incessant  discussion  of  the 
stock-market,  he  did  not  find  there  many  congenial 
associates.  There  were  a  scant  half-dozen  old  friends 
always  glad  of  his  society,  and  with  them  he  drew 
apart.  "We  talk  sense  at  one  end  of  the  room," 
he  used  to  say,  "while  the  rest  of  them  are  talking 
dollars  at  the  other."  He  retained  his  faculties  to 
the  end  of  his  long  life;  but  he  came  in  time  to  have 
an  unwarranted  fear  that  he  had  outstayed  his  wel- 
come in  the  world.  "I  ought  to  have  gone  to  the 


90  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

South  Seas,"  I  have  heard  him  say,  "before  I  was 
too  old.  There  I  should  have  been  killed  and  eaten 
long  ago." 

Ill 

I  have  already  confessed  that  I  did  not  take  my 
studies  as  seriously  as  I  ought  to  have  done;  and  I 
permitted  myself  various  distractions.  One  result 
of  my  thoro  exploration  of  the  Exposition  had  been 
my  discovery  of  Voisin,  the  maker  of  magical  ap- 
paratus; and  my  frequent  visits  to  his  dingy  shop 
in  the  Rue  Vieille  du  Temple  had  been  to  stimulate 
my  earlier  interest  in  conjuring;  and  I  soon  found 
more  than  one  friend  who  shared  my  taste  for  the 
fascinating  art  of  Robert-Houdin.  From  Paris  I  had 
also  brought  back  implements  for  the  exercise  of  the 
kindred  art  of  juggling;  in  time  I  became  fairly 
adept  in  hat-spinning  and  in  keeping  three  or  four 
brass  balls  in  the  air.  A  little  set  of  puppet  figures, 
also  the  spoil  of  my  Parisian  summer,  was  called 
into  service  almost  as  soon  as  I  returned  to  New 
York,  for  I  was  rash  enough  to  volunteer  a  Punch 
and  Judy  performance  as  a  side-show  in  a  fair  for 
the  benefit  of  the  St.  Barnabas  Home.  I  was  not 
sixteen  when  I  made  this  first  appearance  as  a  show- 
man; and,  strictly  speaking,  it  was  not  an  appearance, 
since  I  was  concealed  from  view  by  the  draperies 
dependent  from  the  ledge  from  which  Mr.  Punch 
took  the  club  to  beat  Mrs.  Judy. 

I  must  record  also  that  three  years  earlier  while 
I  was  at  Charlier's,  some  of  my  schoolmates  had  got 


PREPARING  FOR  COLLEGE  91 

up  an  imitation  of  one  of  the  Ravel  pantomimes,  in 
which  I  was  permitted  to  disport  myself  lugubriously 
as  the  clown;  and  after  whitening  myself  for  this 
part,  I  blacked  up  a  little  later  to  tap  on  the  tam- 
bourine in  an  amateur  minstrel  show.  I  may  an- 
ticipate to  note  that  a  year  or  two  thereafter  I 
played  a  low  comedy  part  in  a  one-act  farce,  'Turn 
Him  Out.'  These  various  histrionic  efforts  of  mine 
cannot  have  been  very  exhilarating  to  their  several 
audiences;  but  they  were  beneficial  to  me,  as  they 
convinced  me  that,  whatever  my  native  gifts  might 
be,  they  certainly  did  not  qualify  me  to  persist  in 
trying  to  act.  My  liking  for  the  stage  continued  to 
grow;  but  I  early  became  aware  that  if  I  was  ever 
to  make  my  way  thru  the  stage  door,  it  would  be 
as  an  author  and  not  as  an  actor. 

In  Paris  the  preceding  summer  I  had  gone  to  a 
gymnasium  in  the  Rue  St.  Honore  and  there  I  had 
been  well  taught.  I  had  even  progressed  so  far  as 
to  be  able  to  accomplish  the  more  elementary  feats 
of  the  flying  trapeze  —  that  is  to  say,  I  could  at  least 
project  myself  from  one  trapeze  and  clinch  the  other 
as  it  swung  toward  me.  Now  in  New  York  I  be- 
came an  assiduous  frequenter  of  Gebhard's  gym- 
nasium, on  the  top  floor  of  161  Fifth  Avenue,  at  the 
corner  of  Broadway  and  22d  Street.  As  I  recited 
to  Mr.  Henderson  in  the  evening  and  as  I  was  sup- 
posed to  study  only  in  the  morning,  I  had  my 
afternoons  to  myself,  and  I  spent  nearly  all  of  them 
at  Gebhard's.  I  took  lessons  in  fencing  and  in 
boxing  from  the  special  teachers  who  shared  the 
ample  floor-space  of  the  gymnasium,  altho  in  neither 


92  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

of  these  arts  of  offense  and  defense  did  I  ever  at- 
tain any  high  degree  of  skill.  My  chief  interest 
was  in  the  gymnasium  itself,  where  I  often  had  the 
companionship  of  professional  acrobats  assiduously 
practising  hi  private  the  feats  they  were  to  perform 
in  public. 

In  the  course  of  the  winter  a  group  of  boys  of  my 
own  age,  working  together  afternoon  after  afternoon, 
not  only  gratified  a  strong  liking  for  acrobatics,  but 
also  acquired  a  certain  degree  of  skill.  We  followed 
the  example  of  the  occasional  professionals  who  used 
the  same  apparatus  and  made  a  habit  of  practising 
always  in  the  trunks  and  fleshings  which  gave  com- 
plete freedom  to  our  limbs.  We  did  single  and 
double  trapeze  acts;  we  achieved  the  giant-swing 
and  the  muscle-grind  on  the  horizontal  bar;  we  lay 
on  our  backs  in  the  stand  devised  for  the  purpose, 
and  strove  to  juggle  a  barrel  with  our  feet;  we 
learned  to  leap  with  the  aid  of  the  battoute  board; 
and  we  built  ourselves  up  into  pyramids,  in  which 
I  had  to  bear  the  weight  of  two  or  three  others  on 
my  shoulders.  When  spring  came  we  were  so  proud 
of  our  proficiency  that  we  gave  a  set  entertainment. 

A  faded  copy  of  our  program,  surviving  mirac- 
ulously for  nearly  half  a  century,  reminds  me  that 
this  "First  Annual  Exhibition  of  the  Amateur 
Gymnastic  Club,"  took  place  at  eight  on  the  evening 
of  Wednesday,  April  15,  1868,  and  that  the  whole 
class  began  the  first  part  by  indian-club  exercises, 
and  then  displayed  their  agility  on  the  parallel  bars, 
in  horse- vaulting,  on  the  flying  rings,  in  the  long 
jump,  and  the  high  jump,  and  finally  on  the  hori- 


PREPARING  FOR  COLLEGE  93 

zontal  bar.  The  class-leader  on  the  parallel  bars 
was  Hermann  Oelrichs;  whereas  in  the  long  jump 
and  in  the  high  jump  the  others  followed  Charles  B. 
Jefferson  (the  eldest  son  of  Joseph  Jefferson),  and 
the  writer  of  this  record.  In  the  second  part  the 
opening  number  was  "Juggling  by  B.  Matthews"; 
this  was  followed  by  a  double-trapeze  act,  and  a 
flying-trapeze  act  in  which  I  had  no  hand,  the  inter- 
mediate number  being  "Grotesque  Gymnastics,  in- 
cluding the  Enchanted  Hats,  Gymnastic  Gyrations, 
and  a  Terrific  Broadsword  Combat,  by  the  Corriero 
Brothers."  The  Corriero  brothers  were  three  in 
number,  and  the  other  two  were  Oelrichs  and  Jeffer- 
son, who  were  responsible  for  the  carefully  studied 
fight  with  combat-swords  (very  like  that  described 
in  ( Nicholas  Nickleby');  and  I  took  part  in  the 
earlier  hat-spinning  and  in  the  "frog-leaps"  and 
"porpoise-leaps"  which  masqueraded  as  gymnastic 
gyrations.  The  program  wound  up  with  "The  Cy- 
clops by  Eight  Members  of  the  Club";  I  recall  this 
as  an  imitation  of  the  "brothers  act"  of  the  Hanlons. 
The  spectators  of  this  first  and  last  annual  exhibi- 
tion of  this  gymnastic  club  were  mainly  our  families 
and  our  friends,  but  there  was  also  a  sprinkling  of 
the  professional  circus  men  who  were  accustomed 
to  frequent  the  gymnasium.  After  most  of  our 
guests  had  departed  and  while  we  were  talking 
things  over  preparatory  to  getting  out  of  our  tights 
and  our  "Leotard  bodies,"  one  of  these  circus  men 
accosted  me.  "Say,"  he  began,  "are  you  one  of  the 
Corriero  brothers?"  I  admitted  it.  "Well,"  he 
went  on,  "how  would  you  three  boys  like  to  go  on 


94  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

the  road  this  summer  under  canvas?"  The  father 
of  one  of  the  Corrieros  was  the  most  popular  actor 
on  the  English-speaking  stage;  the  father  of  another 
was  the  head  of  Oelrichs  and  Co.,  the  agents  of  the 
North  German  Lloyd;  and  the  father  of  the  third 
was  then  steadily  engaged  in  buying  expensive  real 
estate.  So  the  possible  pecuniary  rewards  of  a 
summer  on  the  road  under  canvas  were  not  over- 
whelmingly alluring  to  any  one  of  us.  But  no  mere 
money  could  measure  our  ecstatic  delight  at  this 
professional  recognition  of  our  juvenile  efforts.  To 
this  day  I  can  recall  the  thrill  that  ran  thru  me  as 
I  heard  this  most  gratifying  proposal,  and  I  can  see 
again  the  joyous  expression  which  came  over  the 
faces  of  Jefferson  and  Oelrichs  when  I  transmitted 
the  offer  to  them.  In  the  life  of  any  man  such  a 
moment  of  triumph  can  never  be  frequent. 

IV 

Gebhard's  gymnasium  did  not  take  up  the  whole 
of  the  top  floor  of  the  building;  and  a  large  room  on 
the  north  side  was  occupied  as  a  studio  by  J.  Q.  A. 
Ward,  the  sculptor.  Sometimes  he  would  come  out 
into  the  gymnasium  in  his  gray  blouse,  stained  with 
clay,  and  stand  there  silently  watching  as  we  swung 
on  the  flying  rings  or  rolled  over  on  the  mat  in  por- 
poise-leaps. And  one  day  when  I  was  alone,  because 
I  had  come  early  he  accosted  me.  "Don't  you  want 
to  help  me?"  he  asked.  "I'm  at  work  on  a  statue 
of  Shakspere  for  Central  Park,  and  I  can't  get  a 
model  for  the  legs  —  at  least  I  can't  get  one  that 


PREPARING  FOR  COLLEGE  95 

suits  me.  I  wish  you  would  let  me  have  the  loan 
of  your  legs."  Why  it  was  that  I  refused  this  slight 
favor  to  a  distinguished  artist  I  do  not  now  remem- 
ber; probably  partly  from  boyish  shyness  and 
partly  from  boyish  selfishness,  preferring  to  be  busy 
about  my  own  acrobatic  exercises  than  to  stand 
motionless  for  the  benefit  of  a  sculptor.  More  than 
twoscore  years  after  this  foolish  refusal,  Ward's 
statue  was  chosen  as  the  frontispiece  of  my  volume 
on  '  Shakspere  as  a  Playwright ' ;  and  then  I  regretted 
in  vain  that  the  work  of  my  hand  in  my  maturity 
was  not  also  to  be  adorned  by  the  reproduction  of 
my  legs  in  my  boyhood. 

I  can  set  down  with  more  pleasure  the  record  of 
my  relations  with  another  artist  who  came  to  the 
gymnasium  either  that  winter  or  the  next;  this  was 
Leotard,  the  originator  of  the  flying  trapeze.  I  have 
been  told  that  his  father  was  the  manager  of  a  swim- 
ming-bath at  Bordeaux,  and  that  he  first  practised 
his  flights  from  one  trapeze  to  another  over  the 
open  water,  into  which  he  could  fall  without  danger. 
He  had  perfected  his  evolutions  thru  space  before 
he  made  his  first  appearances  in  Paris  with  his  star- 
tling novelty.  This  was  in  1863  or  thereabouts; 
and  the  fame  of  it  had  instantly  spread  to  America. 
The  Hanlons  swiftly  dispatched  one  of  their  number 
to  Paris  to  study  Leotard  and  to  bring  back  his 
method  to  New  York;  then  they  hired  the  Academy 
of  Music  and  plastered  all  over  the  city  the  mysteri- 
ous word  Zampillaerostation,  which  they  had  caused 
to  be  concocted  to  describe  the  art  of  flying  thru 
the  air.  The  Hanlons  were  acrobats  then,  and  not 


96  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

the  pantomimists  they  became  later;  but  they  had 
already  a  keen  feeling  for  theatrical  effect.  Only 
after  all  the  other  Hanlons  had  most  cautiously 
tested  the  several  trapezes,  as  tho  the  slightest  in- 
accuracy of  balance  might  involve  the  danger  of 
death,  did  the  Hanlon  who  was  to  emulate  Leotard 
appear  at  last;  he  was  enfolded  in  a  flowing  black 
cloak,  and  before  casting  this  off  to  begin  his  act, 
he  shook  hands,  solemnly  and  severally,  with  his 
brothers. 

Leotard  was  not  only  the  originator  of  the  flying 
trapeze,  he  was  also  its  incomparable  performer  — 
incomparable  in  the  manly  beauty  of  his  figure,  in 
the  easy  certainty  of  his  execution,  and  in  the  un- 
failing grace  of  all  his  attitudes.  He  came  to  Geb- 
hard's  for  private  practice,  and  as  he  did  not  speak 
English,  and  as  I  had  a  fair  fluency  in  French,  I 
got  to  know  him  very  well.  He  seemed  to  be  a 
simple  and  modest  fellow,  with  a  keen  understand- 
ing of  his  art;  he  had  a  feeling  for  it  which  I  can 
now  understand  better  than  I  did  then,  and  which 
I  can  describe  best  by  saying  that  he  held  himself 
to  be  a  professor  of  beauty,  an  exponent  of  the  grace- 
ful in  action.  Of  course,  he  never  formulated  it  in 
this  fashion;  but  I  am  sure  it  is  not  an  unfair  de- 
duction from  one  of  our  talks.  He  had  asked  me 
to  swing  the  second  trapeze  for  him  as  he  came,  for- 
ward on  the  first.  I  did  so,  and  to  my  amazement 
I  saw  him  holding  by  only  one  hand  to  the  middle 
of  the  trapeze-bar,  then  letting  go  and  catching  the 
second  trapeze  in  the  center;  he  swung  forward 
and  on  the  backward  movement  he  twisted  suddenly 


PREPARING  FOR  COLLEGE  97 

and  caught  the  bar  of  the  first  trapeze.  That  is  to 
say,  he  had  gone  from  the  first  trapeze  to  the  second 
and  then  back  to  the  first  with  the  use  of  the  right 
hand  only. 

After  I  had  expressed  my  wonder  at  this  extraor- 
dinary feat,  I  said:  "But  why  have  I  never  seen 
you  do  that  in  public?" 

"No,"  he  answered;  "and  you  never  will." 

And  when  I  asked  him  why  not,  he  replied:  "I'll 
do  it  again.  Watch  me  and  you  will  see  the  reason." 

Then  he  did  it  again,  and  when  he  had  dropped  to 
the  floor  he  looked  at  me  and  inquired:  "Do  you  see 
now?" 

"Well,"  I  responded,  "it  takes  a  pretty  violent 
effort.  With  only  one  hand,  you  can't  help  being  a 
little  awkward." 

"That's  it,"  he  explained,  "that's  just  it.  It  is 
very  awkward  —  that  is  to  say,  it  must  be  ungrace- 
ful. It  is  excellent  for  my  own  practice.  But  in 
public  I  must  never  make  any  violent  effort.  I  must 
seem  to  be  doing  it  easily;  and  I  must  always  be 
graceful." 

This  is  why  I  have  called  Leotard  an  artist;  and 
in  his  own  line  he  was  as  rigidly  bound  by  the 
eternal  rules  of  his  art  as  was  Ward.  And  thus  it 
was  that  in  my  boyhood  I  received  from  an  acrobat 
an  illustration  of  the  abiding  truth  of  the  Horatian 
maxim  that  to  conceal  art  is  the  highest  art. 


98  THESE  MANY  YEARS 


Despite  these  distractions  I  made  sufficient  prog- 
ress with  my  studies  to  pass  the  entrance  examina- 
tions to  Columbia  College  late  that  spring;  and  in 
the  summer  when  we  went  to  Newport  my  father 
engaged  another  tutor  to  prepare  me  to  present 
myself  in  the  fall  to  pass  the  examinations  which 
would  admit  me  to  the  sophomore  class.  While 
we  sometimes  spent  part  of  the  summer  at  Saratoga, 
coming  down  to  West  Point  for  the  last  fortnight 
before  returning  to  town,  we  were  likely  to  go  to 
Newport,  where  my  father  had  more  than  once  been 
on  the  point  of  purchasing  a  cottage.  Generally  he 
hired  a  house  for  the  summer;  but  he  recognized 
the  truth  of  a  remark  once  made  to  him  by  Mrs. 
Paran  Stevens:  "You  see  the  cottagers  have  the 
inside  track!" 

It  was  in  the  summer  of  1864,  four  years  earlier, 
that  my  father  had  taken  me  to  call  on  an  old 
friend  of  his  who  had  a  son  of  my  own  age;  and 
thus  it  was  that,  when  I  was  only  twelve  I  made 
the  acquaintance  of  W.  C.  Brownell,  the  only  friend 
of  my  later  manhood  who  is  the  son  of  a  friend  of 
my  father's  early  manhood.  In  those  Newport  days 
of  youth  we  met  only  infrequently;  and  our  real 
friendship  dates  from  a  later  time.  When  we  came 
together  again,  he  was  one  of  the  office  staff  of  the 
Nation,  and  I  an  occasional  contributor. 

It  was,  however,  in  this  summer  of  1868  that  I 
took  part  in  an  inglorious  raid,  the  result  of  the 


PREPARING  FOR  COLLEGE  99 

bitter  feeling  of  hostility  toward  England  which  re- 
sulted from  her  attitude  during  the  recently  ended 
Civil  War.  One  of  a  half-dozen  other  boys  whom 
I  then  knew  at  Newport  discovered  that  an  English- 
man was  occupying  a  cottage  out  near  Ochre  Point, 
and  that  he  was  flaunting  his  offensive  nationality 
by  flying  the  British  flag  over  a  tent  on  his  lawn. 
We  planned  at  once  to  make  a  nocturnal  expedition 
to  destroy  the  obnoxious  banner;  and  one  moon- 
light night  we  walked  out  to  the  offending  house, 
sternly  resolved  to  show  the  alien  that  the  Union 
Jack  had  no  right  to  be  displayed  on  American  soil. 
When  we  had  arrived  where  the  tent  gleamed  white 
in  the  moonbeams,  we  could  not  perceive  the  hated 
standard;  and  then  we  realized,  too  late,  that  we 
had  come  on  a  fool's  errand,  since  the  flag  had,  of 
course,  been  lowered  at  sunset. 

When  the  summer  came  to  an  end  I  could  not  but 
be  aware  that  my  studying  had  been  desultory  and 
unsatisfactory  even  to  myself.  It  was  with  trepida- 
tion that  I  presented  myself  at  Columbia  as  an 
applicant  for  admission  to  the  sophomore  class. 
My  knowledge  was  so  insufficient  that  I  probably 
did  not  appreciate  how  inadequately  I  was  equipped 
for  the  ordeal.  Yet  I  was  none  the  less  disagreeably 
surprised  when  I  went  up  to  learn  the  result  of  my 
examination,  and  when  I  was  informed  by  Professor 
Van  Amringe  that  my  application  to  enter  as  a 
sophomore  was  refused,  and  that  I  had,  therefore, 
to  join  the  entering  freshman  class.  Of  course,  this 
was  a  most  proper  verdict  of  the  faculty;  and  there 
was  no  good  reason  why  I  should  not  accept  it  — 


100  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

except  that  I  had  more  friends  in  the  class  of  1871 
than  I  had  in  the  class  of  1872,  and  that  therefore 
I  wanted  to  be  received  as  a  sophomore. 

I  went  home  to  my  father,  who  sympathized  with 
my  disappointment.  The  next  morning  he  paid  a 
visit  to  Columbia  and  had  a  long  interview  with 
President  Barnard.  What  arguments  he  was  able 
to  use  in  a  bad  cause  I  cannot  now  guess;  but  he 
won  his  point,  probably  by  the  weight  of  his  own 
personality.  The  president  overruled  the  decision 
of  the  faculty  and  admitted  me  to  the  advanced 
standing  I  sought  on  the  sole  condition  that  I  should 
take  a  tutor  and  make  up  the  deficiencies  in  my 
preparation. 


CHAPTER  VI 
UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS 


THE  college  which  I  entered  as  a  student  in 
the  fall  of  1868  was  a  totally  different  insti- 
tution from  the  university  of  the  same  name 
in  which  I  am  now  a  professor;  and  to  those  who 
know  Columbia  in  the  first  quarter  of  the  twentieth 
century  as  one  of  the  strongest  and  most  coherently 
organized  of  American  universities,  it  is  not  easy  to 
convey  an  illuminating  idea  of  the  simplicity  and 
isolation  of  Columbia  College  in  the  third  quarter  of 
the  nineteenth  century.  The  great  university  of  the 
present  is  the  logical  development  of  the  small  col- 
lege of  the  past,  little  as  they  may  seem  to  have  in 
common;  and  as  I  look  back  now  I  perceive  that  it 
was  in  my  senior  year  when  there  appeared  the 
earliest  sign  of  a  transformation  of  the  rigid  tradi- 
tions accepted  without  cavil  or  comment  when  I 
was  a  sophomore.  These  traditions  were  survivals, 
inherited  by  the  college  of  the  nineteenth  century 
from  the  college  of  the  eighteenth  century;  and  the 
college  in  the  eighteenth  century  must  have  been 
more  or  less  inferior  to  a  high  school  of  the  best 
type  in  the  twentieth  century,  with  less  liberality 
and  with  less  richness  of  opportunity. 

A  scant  decade  before  I  came  to  it  Columbia  had 

abandoned  the  group  of  buildings  originally  erected 

101 


102  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

for  King's  College,  and  taken  possession  of  a  de- 
serted deaf-and-dumb  asylum  on  the  block  between 
Madison  and  Fourth  Avenues  and  49th  and  50th 
Streets.  That  part  of  New  York  had  then  scarcely 
begun  to  be  built  up;  neither  St.  Patrick's  Cathedral 
nor  the  Grand  Central  Station  was  completed;  and 
there  were  then  foul  cattle-yards  just  below  the 
college,  stretching  from  Madison  to  Fifth  Avenue. 
Central  Park  was  just  finished  after  about  fifteen 
years'  work;  but  scarcely  a  house  skirted  its  edges 
even  along  its  southern  side.  The  main  building  of 
the  college  was  architecturally  pretentious,  but  un- 
deniably shabby  in  its  coat  of  dingy  stucco;  and  this 
was  flanked  by  two  smaller  edifices  equally  devoid 
of  dignity  and  beauty.  One  of  these  smaller  houses 
was  the  residence  of  a  professor,  whose  wash  was 
flaunted  in  our  gaze  at  the  beginning  of  every  week; 
and  the  other  provided  a  large  bare  room  which 
served  as  a  chapel,  while  the  upper  floor  contained 
the  library,  such  as  it  was.  The  main  building  had 
half  a  dozen  classrooms;  and  here  also  was  the 
office  of  the  president,  for  whom  an  official  residence 
of  red  brick  and  brown  stone  had  been  erected  on 
the  49th  Street  front.  Back  on  the  corner  of  Fourth 
Avenue  and  50th  Street  was  an  old  sash-and-blind 
factory  assigned  to  the  recently  established  School 
of  Mines. 

In  my  time  there  was  no  solidarity  of  sentiment 
between  the  undergraduates  of  the  college  and  the 
students  of  the  School  of  Mines;  and  I  doubt  if  I 
then  knew  by  sight  more  than  three  or  four  of  the 
"Miners."  Nor  did  we  have  occasion  to  meet  the 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  103 

law  students,  since  their  school  was  more  than  two 
miles  distant  —  in  Lafayette  Place.  And  only  nom- 
inal was  the  connection  of  Columbia  with  the  pro- 
prietary College  of  Physicians  and  Surgeons,  which 
was  almost  equally  remote  —  at  the  corner  of 
Fourth  Avenue  and  23d  Street.  With  the  atten- 
dants at  these  other  schools  more  or  less  attached  to 
Columbia,  the  undergraduates  of  the  old  college  had 
no  points  of  contact,  and  sought  none.  We  did  not 
doubt  that  we  were  the  sole  representatives  of  Co- 
lumbia, and  that  all  the  others  were  merely  outsiders. 

We  might  consider  ourselves  a  select  body,  and 
we  were  certainly  a  very  small  community.  First 
and  last  the  class  of  1871  may  have  had  a  scant  half- 
hundred  members;  in  the  course  of  our  four  years 
not  a  few  fell  by  the  wayside;  and  we  numbered  only 
thirty -one  when  we  graduated,  at  which  time  the 
junior  class  had  thirty  men,  the  sophomore  twenty- 
three,  and  the  freshman  thirty -six,  making  the  total 
undergraduate  attendance  exactly  one  hundred  and 
twenty.  We  were  not  only  far  fewer  than  the 
senior  class  of  to-day,  we  were  also  much  younger. 
For  example,  I  was  nineteen  when  I  graduated,  nor 
was  I  the  youngest  by  one  or  two;  and  the  average 
age  of  the  members  of  the  class  on  entering  was  less 
than  sixteen. 

It  is  to  this  comparative  juvenility  that  I  must 
ascribe  the  disorderly  conduct  of  which  we  were 
now  and  then  guilty,  our  occasional  boisterous  neg- 
lect of  stated  exercises,  and  our  less  frequent  out- 
breaks of  actual  violence,  even  in  our  senior  year, 
when  handfuls  of  fine  shot  were  thrown  repeatedly 


104  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

at  an  unfortunate  lecturer  who  had  failed  to  win  our 
respect.  We  were  only  boys  after  all;  and  we  had 
none  of  the  latter-day  safety-valves  for  our  animal 
spirits.  It  is  true  that  there  was  a  plot  of  grass 
under  the  trees  where  we  could  kick  a  casual  foot- 
ball after  hours;  but  this  was  the  sole  available  out- 
let for  our  boyish  energy.  The  area  of  our  activities, 
educational  and  social,  was  almost  as  restricted  as 
the  space  available  for  our  physical  exercises.  Per- 
haps the  simplicity  of  our  life  can  be  exemplified  by 
a  single  fact:  all  the  exercises  of  the  institution  were 
suspended  whenever  a  trustee  of  the  college  died. 
Naturally  we  held  it  to  be  unfair  and  even  mean 
for  any  trustee  to  die  on  a  Saturday,  and  so  cheat 
us  out  of  our  unexpected  holiday. 

Henry  James  once  pointed  out  that  here  in  the 
United  States  in  Hawthorne's  youth  there  were 
lacking  most  of  the  constituent  elements  of  romance 
as  these  might  be  cataloged  on  the  European  conti- 
nent, since  we  had  no  king  and  no  court,  no  palaces 
and  no  castles,  no  cathedrals  and  no  established 
church,  no  galleries  and  museums,  no  political  so- 
ciety, and  no  sporting  class.  It  would  not  be  diffi- 
cult to  draw  up  a  list  of  things  common  in  nearly  all 
the  colleges  of  the  present  which  were  totally  absent 
from  the  Columbia  of  my  early  undergraduate  days. 
We  had  no  dormitories;  we  had  no  gymnasium  and 
no  athletic  field,  no  swimming-pool,  and  no  boat- 
house;  we  had  no  athletics  at  all,  no  track-teams, 
no  crew,  no  baseball  nine;  we  had  no  glee-club  and 
no  mandolin -club ;  we  had  no  dramatics,  no  per- 
formances of  plays  ancient  or  modern;  we  had  no 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  105 

intercollegiate  debates;  we  had  no  college  paper, 
daily  or  weekly;  we  had  no  student  reading-rooms, 
nor  had  we  any  books  that  students  were  really 
expected  to  read. 

After  listing  the  blanks  in  Hawthorne's  back- 
ground, Mr.  James  suggested  that  "the  natural  re- 
mark in  the  almost  lurid  light  of  such  an  indictment, 
would  be  that  if  these  things  are  left  out,  everything 
is  left  out."  Then  the  acute  critic  added  that  "the 
American  knows  that  a  good  deal  remains."  And 
we  who  were  undergraduates  at  Columbia  when  it 
exhibited  this  "terrible  denudation"  know  that  a 
great  deal  remained,  even  if  it  is  not  easy  for  us  to 
declare  this  remainder  with  precision.  The  back- 
ground might  have  its  blanks,  but  after  all  the  atmos- 
phere was  not  so  very  different  from  what  it  is  now. 
We  had  the  unconquerable  spirit  of  youth,  and 
we  were  possessed  by  a  feeling  of  solidarity.  We 
dumbly  knew  that  we  had  entered  into  our  inheri- 
tance —  even  if  we  were  incapable  of  appreciating 
its  value. 


II 

In  so  small  a  college  the  president  was  able  to 
call  all  the  students  by  name,  and  to  give  them 
personal  attention.  To  him  their  discipline  was 
intrusted,  altho  on  occasion  a  student  might  be 
summoned  to  appear  before  the  entire  faculty.  If 
we  were  late,  it  was  to  the  president  that  we  had  to 
go  to  make  our  excuses.  We  had  profound  respect 
for  Dr.  Barnard;  we  knew  him  to  be  as  kindly  as 


106  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

he  was  distinguished;  but  we  could  not  help  perceiv- 
ing that  he  was  very  deaf  —  and  there  were  those 
among  us  not  unwilling  to  take  unworthy  advantage 
of  this  patent  infirmity.  More  than  once  an  under- 
graduate who  lived  a  little  way  up  the  Hudson 
went  into  the  president's  office  to  ask  forgiveness 
for  his  tardiness,  raising  his  voice  on  certain  words 
and  lowering  them  on  others.  "I  am  sorry  I  was 
late  this  morning.  I  wish  I  could  say  that  the  train 
was  behind  time  —  but  I  can't."  And  to  this  the 
president  would  reply:  "As  the  train  was  late,  you 
are  excused."  There  was  even  a  story  that,  one 
year  before  my  time,  when  Dr.  Barnard  himself 
gave  the  senior  course  on  the  'Evidences  of  Natural 
and  Revealed  Religion,'  the  class  quartet  used  to 
gather  at  the  far  end  of  the  long  room  and  practise 
their  part-songs,  until  the  president  was  moved  to 
complain  about  the  constant  buzzing  of  which  his 
ears  made  him  doubtfully  conscious. 

Perhaps  one  reason  why  we  behaved  now  and 
again  as  if  we  were  unruly  boys  is  that  we  were  treated 
as  boys.  We  had  none  of  the  liberty  into  which 
freshmen  now  enter  when  once  they  have  matricu- 
lated. For  us  the  college  was  only  a  continuation 
of  the  school  we  had  just  left,  with  no  larger  oppor- 
tunity, and  with  no  change  in  the  method  of  instruc- 
tion. The  program  of  studies  was  rigidly  restricted 
and  it  did  not  vary  year  after  year.  The  whole 
undergraduate  body  was  required  to  attend  chapel 
at  a  quarter  before  ten;  and  there  we  found  await- 
ing us  the  entire  faculty,  which  consisted  then  of 
only  seven  professors.  At  ten  our  solid  class  went 


UNDERGRADUATE   DAYS  107 

to  its  first  recitation;  at  eleven  it  moved  on  for  an- 
other; at  twelve  it  presented  itself  before  a  third 
professor;  and  at  one  we  were  free  for  the  rest  of 
the  day.  When  I  say  that  we  went  to  three  recita- 
tions a  day,  I  mean  it;  we  recited  exactly  as  we 
had  done  in  school.  We  were  expected  to  prepare 
so  many  lines  of  Latin  and  Greek,  or  so  many 
problems  in  mathematics,  or  so  many  pages  of  the 
text-book  in  logic  or  in  political  economy;  and  in 
the  classroom  we  were  severally  called  upon  to  dis- 
gorge this  undigested  information.  And  it  was  in- 
formation that  we  were  expected  to  acquire,  rather 
than  the  ability  to  turn  this  to  account  and  to  think 
for  ourselves. 

We  were  rarely  encouraged  to  go  outside  the  text- 
book; and  no  collateral  reading  was  either  required 
or  suggested.  We  were  not  urged  to  use  the  library; 
indeed  it  might  be  asserted  that  any  utilization  of 
its  few  books  was  almost  discouraged.  The  library 
was  open  only  for  one  or  two  hours  a  day,  after  one 
o'clock  when  most  of  us  had  gone  home  to  our 
luncheons.  I,  for  one,  never  climbed  its  stairs  to 
avail  myself  of  its  carefully  guarded  treasures;  and 
I  doubt  if  any  one  of  my  classmates  was  more  dar- 
ing in  adventuring  himself  within  its  austere  walls, 
lined  with  glazed  cases  all  cautiously  locked.  It 
contained  less  than  fifteen  thousand  volumes;  and 
it  possessed  no  book  which  the  grave  and  learned 
custodian  had  not  personally  examined  to  make 
sure  that  it  was  fit  reading  for  youths  of  our  tender 
years.  This  scrupulous  librarian  was  allowed  a 
sum  of  one  thousand  dollars  a  year  for  the  increase 


108  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

of  his  collection;  and  he  purchased  only  the  very 
few  volumes  which  he  felt  to  be  absolutely  neces- 
sary, taking  great  pride  in  returning  to  the  treasury 
of  the  college  as  large  an  unexpended  balance  as 
might  be  possible. 

Professor  Lounsbury  once  told  me  that  during 
his  student  career  at  Yale,  a  little  more  than  ten 
years  earlier  than  mine  at  Columbia,  he  never  heard 
mention  of  any  English  author.  In  the  decade  that 
divided  us  the  world  had  moved  at  least  a  little; 
and  we  had  one  term  in  the  history  of  English 
literature.  But  we  were  not  introduced  to  the  ac- 
tual writings  of  any  of  the  authors,  nor  was  any 
hint  dropped  that  we  might  possibly  be  benefited 
by  reading  them  for  ourselves.  We  had  to  procure 
a  certain  manual  of  English  literature,  and  to  recite 
from  its  pages  the  names  of  writers,  the  titles  of 
books,  and  the  dates  of  publication  —  facts  of  little 
significance  and  of  slight  value  unless  we  happened 
to  be  familiar  with  the  several  authors  as  a  result 
of  home  influence,  or  of  private  taste.  The  manual 
prescribed  for  us  was  the  compilation  of  a  stolid 
text-book  maker  by  the  name  of  Shaw;  and  it  illus- 
trated admirably  the  definition  of  history  as  "an 
arid  region  abounding  in  dates." 

In  its  freshman  year,  which  I  had  skipped,  my 
class  had  had  a  course  in  rhetoric,  also  studied  in  a 
formal  text-book,  providing  detailed  information  as 
to  the  names  which  had  been  bestowed  upon  the 
several  devices  employed  in  the  art  of  composition. 
But  there  was  little  or  no  instruction  in  the  art  it- 
self, in  the  actual  practice  of  writing.  The  course 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  109 

in  rhetoric  was  given  by  a  tutor,  whereas  the  course 
in  English  literature  was  given  by  a  professor.  This 
professor  was  a  very  learned  Scotsman,  Charles 
Murray  Nairne;  and  the  full  title  of  his  chair  dis- 
closed the  fact  that  to  him  was  intrusted  the  in- 
struction in  "Moral  and  Intellectual  Philosophy  and 
English  Literature."  Yet  this  title,  ample  as  it 
may  seem,  did  not  indicate  the  complete  range  of 
his  responsibilities,  for  to  him  was  also  committed 
the  care  of  history,  of  political  economy,  and  of 
logic.  It  was  not  only  a  chair  that  he  filled,  or  even 
a  settee;  it  was  a  series  of  settees,  rising  row  on  row; 
and  there  are  now  at  Columbia  probably  nearly  a 
hundred  professors  teaching  the  subjects  which  were 
then  confided  to  the  sole  care  of  this  one  man. 

I  think,  altho  I  am  not  at  all  certain,  that  I  must 
have  had  a  course  in  philosophy,  but  if  I  did  it  left 
no  trace,  and  it  imparted  no  mental  training.  I  do 
not  suppose  that  the  instruction  was  inferior  at 
Columbia  then  to  what  it  was  in  most  of  the  other 
small  colleges;  in  fact,  I  am  inclined  to  believe  that 
it  was  on  the  whole  superior.  Yet  I  have  always 
regretted  that  I  did  not  come  under  a  teacher  who 
might  have  imparted  to  me  a  realizing  sense  of  the 
meaning  and  the  value  of  philosophy,  who  might 
have  opened  my  mind  and  taught  me  how  to  think. 
There  was  then  a  teacher  of  this  type  at  Amherst, 
where  my  friend  W.  C.  Brownell  was  my  contem- 
porary; and  in  the  Amherst  men  of  Seelye's  time  I 
have  always  been  able  to  perceive  the  mark  of  his 
stimulating  influence.  I  remember  that  I  had  one 
term  in  logic  and  another  in  political  economy; 


110  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

and  altho  the  latter  introduced  me  to  sound  doc- 
trine, the  former  left  absolutely  no  impression. 
From  our  single  term  in  English  literature  under 
Professor  Nairne,  I  can  resuscitate  only  one  utter- 
ance of  his  —  to  the  effect  that  the  distinction  be- 
tween poetry  and  prose  might  be  made  clear  by  re- 
membering that  "exceeding  beautiful"  was  prose, 
whereas  "beautiful  exceedingly"  was  poetry. 

It  was  in  Latin  and  in  Greek  that  I  suffered  the 
most  from  my  deficient  preparation,  due  partly  to 
my  foolish  desire  to  enter  as  a  sophomore,  without 
having  had  the  full  work  of  freshman  year  and 
partly,  indeed  chiefly,  to  the  fact  that  no  one  of  my 
school-teachers  at  Anthon's  or  Churchill's  or  Char- 
lier's  had  made  me  understand  the  necessity  of  thoro- 
ness.  I  had  insisted  on  being  allowed  to  take  my 
place  in  the  ranks,  when  I  ought  to  have  been  under- 
going the  merciless  drill  of  the  awkward  squad. 
Naturally  enough  my  acquaintance  with  Latin  was 
less  fragmentary  than  with  Greek.  The  professor 
of  Latin  was  Charles  Short,  a  man  of  many  amusing 
peculiarities,  but  possessed  of  real  learning  and  in- 
spired by  a  genuine  love  of  letters.  He  opened  my 
eyes  to  the  charm  of  Horace,  the  chief  Roman  rep- 
resentative of  what  Cowper  called  "familiar  verse"; 
and  as  he  suggested  that  we  cast  into  metrical  form 
our  assigned  translations,  I  owe  to  him  almost  my 
earliest  impulse  to  spy  out  the  secrets  of  English 
versification. 

The  professor  of  Greek  was  Henry  Drisler,  one  of 
the  most  copious  contributors  to  Liddell  and  Scott's 
dictionary.  He  was  an  erudite  scholar  with  an  abid- 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  111 

ing  simplicity  of  manner  in  all  his  dealings  with  us. 
In  his  classroom,  we  stumbled  thru  the  'Agamem- 
non' of  JSschylus,  the  '(Edipus  Rex'  of  Sophocles, 
the  ' Medea'  of  Euripides,  and  the  'Frogs'  of  Aris- 
tophanes. Brief  as  it  was,  no  better  selection  could 
be  made  of  the  plays  typical  of  the  development 
of  Greek  drama,  tragic  and  comic;  and  the  reading 
of  these  masterpieces  in  the  original  might  have 
been  expected  to  awaken  in  me  a  keen  interest  in 
the  Attic  theater.  I  was  already  an  assiduous  play- 
goer, having  also  some  slight  acquaintance  with  the 
French  stage;  but  a  suggestion  that  we  should  pro- 
cure Donaldson's  'Theater  of  the  Greeks'  was  not 
pushed  any  further,  and  I  failed  entirely  to  feel  the 
theatrical  effectiveness  of  any  one  of  the  four  pieces. 
Either  Professor  Drisler  did  not  himself  visualize 
these  once  popular  plays  as  having  been  originally 
devised  by  their  several  authors  to  be  performed  by 
actual  actors  in  a  real  theater  before  sympathizing 
audiences,  or  else  he  did  not  believe  that  we  were 
old  enough  or  ripe  enough  in  scholarship  to  take  this 
point  of  view.  Whatever  the  reason,  the  fact  re- 
mains that  in  his  classroom  these  plays  were  not 
revealed  to  us  as  drama,  or  even  as  poetry;  they 
were  only  texts  for  translation,  affording  endless 
opportunities  for  a  strictly  grammatical  inquisition 
into  the  darker  interstices  of  our  linguistic  half- 
knowledge.  Thus  it  is  that  my  undergraduate  study 
of  Sophocles,  for  instance,  did  not  reveal  to  me  the 
loftiness  of  his  soul,  the  vigor  of  his  stern  philos- 
ophy or  his  exquisitely  skilful  craftsmanship  as  a 
playwright;  it  left  me  rather  with  an  annoying  per- 


THESE  MANY  YEARS 

ception  of  his  persistent  perversity  in  employing  the 
second  aorist. 

Here  again  I  feel  bound  to  emphasize  my  belief 
that  my  class  at  Columbia  was  not  more  unfortunate 
in  our  study  of  the  great  dramatic  poets  of  Greek 
than  the  immense  majority  of  other  classes  in  other 
colleges,  not  only  in  those  remote  days  but  even  now. 
There  are  still  only  a  few  professors  of  Greek  who 
endeavor  to  make  their  students  realize  and  visualize 
the  Greek  theater,  who  illustrate  their  instruction 
by  the  aid  of  the  graphic  material  now  abundantly 
available,  and  who  strive  to  relate  it  intimately  to 
the  Athenian  life  of  that  superb  and  astounding 
epoch.  I  remember  that  when  Benjamin  Ide 
Wheeler  (now  president  of  the  University  of  Cali- 
fornia) was  a  professor  at  Cornell,  I  heard  a  fellow 
professor  of  Greek  mention  with  unconcealed  dis- 
approval, that  "Ben  Wheeler  is  teaching  Greek 
with  a  magic  lantern !" 

Ill 

In  the  summer  of  1869,  in  the  vacation  that  inter- 
vened between  my  sophomore  and  my  junior  years, 
my  father  allowed  me  to  go  on  a  trip  to  the  West. 
I  suppose  that  he  thought  it  would  be  well  for  me  to 
see  something  of  my  own  country,  after  having  seen 
more  or  less  of  Europe  as  a  child  and  as  a  boy. 
One  of  my  college  friends,  Edward  Fermor  Hall, 
accompanied  me;  and  we  were  under  the  charge 
of  a  teacher  from  Charlier's,  Mr.  Brown.  We  went 
first  to  Chicago,  where  we  took  a  steamer  to  the  end 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  113 

of  Lake  Michigan,  leaving  it  to  shoot  the  rapids  of 
Sault  Ste.  Marie  while  the  boat  was  going  thru  the 
locks,  and  landing  at  Superior  City  opposite  Duluth. 
Superior  City  had  been  laid  out  on  a  most  magnifi- 
cent scale,  befitting  the  future  metropolis,  which  was 
to  mark  the  end  of  navigation  on  the  great  lakes. 
When  we  arrived  its  boom  had  already  burst,  and 
it  had  only  a  hundred  or  two  inhabitants.  One  of 
its  projectors  was  John  C.  Breckenridge,  with  whom 
we  had  a  brief  interview.  Duluth  was  less  than 
half-a-dozen  miles  distant,  and  it  had  then  exactly 
half-a-dozen  houses. 

It  was  our  intention  to  go  up  the  St.  Louis  River 
into  the  Chippewa  Reservation,  and  to  make  a  carry 
over  to  one  of  the  streams  flowing  into  the  Missis- 
sippi which  would  bear  us  down  to  Minneapolis. 
In  Superior  City  we  bought  a  birch  canoe;  we  filled 
it  with  supplies  for  a  fortnight;  and  we  engaged  two 
Indians  to  take  us  on  our  trip.  The  first  night  we 
camped  at  Fond  du  Lac  on  the  banks  of  the  St. 
Louis  River  within  earshot  of  Duluth,  where  there 
had  been  landed  only  that  day  the  earliest  of  the 
many  boat-loads  of  men  who  were  to  be  engaged  in 
building  the  Northern  Pacific  Railroad.  We  had 
been  told  that  these  laborers  were  dissatisfied  about 
something;  that  they  had  got  at  liquor;  and  that 
they  might  make  trouble.  At  intervals  during  the 
night  we  heard  shouts  and  occasional  shots;  and  in 
the  morning  we  were  not  sorry  to  be  able  to  start 
on  our  voyage. 

There  had  been  more  rain  than  usual  at  that 
season  —  it  was  then  July;  and  the  river  was  out 


114  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

of  its  banks.  The  series  of  cascades  known  as  the 
Dalles  of  the  St.  Louis  were  far  wider  than  they  or- 
dinarily were;  and  we  poled  slowly  up  the  shallower 
sides  of  the  stream.  Soon  we  had  to  give  this  up 
and  to  make  a  seven-mile  carry,  sometimes  with 
the  water  almost  up  to  our  waists.  The  rain  was 
intermittent  but  abundant;  and  the  trail  was  a 
neglected  corduroy  road,  with  only  an  occasional 
log  in  its  proper  place,  the  others  having  rotted  away 
or  sunk  deep  into  the  mud.  We  three  whites  were 
thoroly  tired  out  by  our  unwonted  miles  over 
an  unaccustomed  road;  but  the  Indians  seemed  to 
feel  no  fatigue  at  all,  altho  they  had  to  make  the 
trip  three  times,  once  with  the  huge  birch  canoe, 
carried  on  their  shoulders  as  they  pushed  past  the 
dripping  trees  and  thru  the  soaking  underbrush, 
keeping  up  their  steady  jog-trot,  and  again  as  they 
went  back  to  bring  us  the  supplies  which  we  had 
been  unable  to  carry  for  ourselves. 

When  at  last  in  the  twilight  of  the  forest  we  made 
our  camp  on  the  bank  of  the  St.  Louis  above  the 
Dalles  it  was  still  raining,  and  I  observed  with  keen 
appreciation  the  swiftness  with  which  the  Indians 
found  dry  wood,  and  made  a  fire,  cut  poles  for  our 
shelter-tents,  and  gathered  springy  evergreen  twigs 
to  make  beds  for  us,  so  that  we  might  be  lifted  a 
little  above  the  sodden  grass  and  moss.  We  were 
protected  from  the  rain  only  by  two  or  three  rubber 
blankets  laced  together  and  thrown  over  poles  that 
slanted  forward  to  the  fire;  and  we  lay  under  this 
fragile  shed  with  our  feet  almost  in  the  ashes,  and 
with  our  legs  covered  by  other  rubber  blankets, 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  115 

while  on  the  opposite  side  of  the  blazing  logs  the 
two  Indians,  each  curled  up  into  a  ball  like  a  squirrel, 
slept  with  their  heads  under  their  woollen  blankets, 
which  were  ever  absorbing  more  and  more  moisture. 

It  was  the  first  time  I  had  ever  lived  out  in  the 
open;  the  first  time  I  had  ever  camped  out;  the  first 
time  I  had  ever  entered  the  forest  primeval;  the 
first  time  I  had  ever  come  into  personal  relations 
with  the  red  man,  whom  I  knew  then  not  from 
Cooper  and  Parkman,  but  only  from  Edward  S. 
Ellis's  stories  in  the  yellow-back  Beadle's  Dime 
Novels.  The  two  Indians  who  were  with  us  spoke 
no  English,  and  their  sparse  French  was  habitant 
French  rather  than  Parisian.  But  they  were  quick 
to  understand  our  directions  and  our  inquiries.  We 
asked  the  Chippewa  names  for  the  necessary  objects 
of  travel;  and  in  the  course  of  the  ten  days  that  we 
were  with  them  we  managed  to  accumulate  a  vocab- 
ulary of  several  score  native  words.  Mr.  Brown  suc- 
ceeded in  compounding  a  Chippewa  rendering  of  the 
old  German  drinking-song  'Edete,  bibete,  collegi- 
ales ' ;  and  this  we  used  to  sing,  altho  I  doubt  if  its 
meaning  was  apprehended  by  the  two  stalwart  and 
skilful  redskins  who  were  propelling  us  forward  by 
the  untiring  strokes  of  their  paddles. 

How  stalwart  and  how  skilful  they  were  we  had 
occasion  to  perceive  the  fourth  day  after  we  had 
started.  We  were  going  up  a  series  of  rapids  which 
continued  for  perhaps  half  a  mile,  and  which  were 
not  so  severe  as  to  force  us  to  make  a  carry  around 
them.  The  current  was  strong  owing  to  the  high 
water,  and  to  avoid  its  full  force  we  kept  inshore. 


116  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Of  course  it  was  far  too  strong  to  be  overcome  by 
paddling;  and  our  Indians,  one  in  the  bow  and  the 
other  in  the  stern,  were  poling  us  up.  It  was  diffi- 
cult work,  as  the  bottom  was  rocky,  making  it  hard 
to  place  the  poles  so  as  to  get  a  proper  purchase. 
When  we  were  within  a  hundred  feet  of  the  top  of 
the  last  of  the  series  of  rapids,  the  pole  in  the  hands 
of  the  Indian  in  the  bow  snapped  short.  Without  a 
moment's  hesitation,  and  before  our  birch  could 
even  begin  to  swing  broadside  to  the  current,  he 
measured  the  length  of  the  fragment  in  his  hand 
with  that  which  had  been  caught  between  the  two 
rocks  in  the  water.  He  instantly  threw  away  the 
shorter  piece,  and  thrusting  his  hand  down  into  the 
current  he  gripped  the  longer  half,  and  so  held  the 
canoe  head  on  to  the  stream.  For  the  second  time 
in  two  years  I  had  the  Vision  of  Sudden  Death. 
The  Indian  in  the  stern  passed  his  pole  to  his  fellow 
in  the  bow,  who  thrust  it  down  and  held  it  with 
one  hand  while  with  the  other  he  pulled  up  his  own 
broken  end.  When  the  Indian  in  the  stern  had 
possession  of  this  abbreviated  rod,  the  two  of  them 
cautiously  contrived  to  get  us  to  the  nearest  bank, 
where  one  of  them  jumped  ashore  and  cut  another 
pole. 

The  Chippewa  outbreak  of  1862  had  taken  place 
only  seven  years  before,  when  the  fighting  men  of 
the  State  were  otherwise  engaged  in  Virginia;  and 
there  we  were  for  more  than  a  week  alone  in  the 
Reservation,  seeing  the  face  of  no  white  man  in 
those  ten  days,  except  that  of  the  blacksmith  on 
Platt  Island,  stationed  there  by  the  United  States 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  117 

Government  for  the  benefit  of  the  Indians.  Him 
we  found  on  our  fourth  day,  and  with  him  we  had 
a  brief  parley.  He  had  two  Indian  squaws,  but  he 
was  glad  of  a  chance  to  pass  the  time  of  day  with 
men  of  his  own  race.  After  we  left  him  we  came  to 
a  broader  body  of  water,  and  we  suddenly  became 
conscious  that  our  canoe  was  not  the  only  one  in  the 
stream.  Just  behind  us  and  rapidly  approaching 
was  another,  silently  propelled  by  the  paddles  of 
four  Indians.  They  drew  abreast  of  us,  inter- 
changed a  few  sentences  with  the  two  Indians  in 
our  canoe,  and  then  started  forward  and  were  soon 
lost  to  sight.  Another  day  we  paused  for  our  mid- 
day meal  at  an  Indian  settlement  of  a  dozen  birch- 
bark-covered  tepees  —  if  they  so  be  called,  since  they 
were  not  conical  but  cubical  —  standing  about  seven 
feet  high  and  a  dozen  feet  long. 

After  seven  days  of  paddling  and  poling  up-stream 
we  made  a  carry  of  two  or  three  miles,  launching 
the  canoe  in  a  creek  which  was  not  more  than  a 
yard  wide,  but  which  soon  broadened  out  into  a 
sizable  stream.  By  this  portage  we  had  removed 
ourselves  from  water  that  flowed  into  the  St.  Law- 
rence to  water  that  flowed  into  the  Mississippi;  and 
with  the  current  in  our  favor,  we  were  not  long  in 
entering  the  great  river  itself.  We  had  hoped  to 
reach  Crow  Wing  —  where  we  could  take  the  rail- 
road to  Minneapolis  —  before  dark  on  our  last  day. 
But  our  Indians  must  have  miscalculated  the  dis- 
tance, and  it  was  long  after  midnight  before  we  were 
able  to  get  out  of  the  canoe.  It  was  a  clear  night 
above,  but  a  fog  hung  low  in  the  surface  of  the 


118  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

water,  so  that  we  did  not  think  it  wise  to  doze  off. 
To  keep  ourselves  awake  we  sang  all  the  songs  we 
knew,  and  we  recited  all  the  poetry  we  had  ever 
learned.  When  these  resources  were  exhausted,  Hall 
began  to  repeat  to  us  the  bald  text  of  the  'Black 
Crook,'  a  spectacle  which  he  had  seen  nearly  a  hun- 
dred times,  so  that  its  turgid  dialog  had  deposited  it- 
self in  his  memory. 

The  next  morning  we  paid  off  our  Indian  compan- 
ions, giving  them  also  the  canoe  and  the  residue  of 
our  supplies.  We  arrived  at  the  hotel  in  St.  Paul 
three  sorry -looking  tramps.  Fortunately,  our  trunks 
were  awaiting  us,  and  we  were  able  to  resume  the 
garb  of  civilization.  Two  days  later  we  left  St. 
Paul  on  the  steamboat  Northern  Belle  to  go  down 
the  Mississippi.  I  recall  that  we  ran  into  a  hurri- 
cane that  evening  just  as  twilight  was  settling  down, 
and  while  we  were  going  thru  a  rocky  defile;  and 
when  I  came  in  after  years  to  read  Huck  Finn's 
account  of  the  storm  on  the  Mississippi  in  which  he 
was  caught,  I  realized  at  once  the  veracity  of  Mark 
Twain's  description. 

After  a  two  days'  voyage  down  the  Mississippi  we 
left  the  Northern  Belle  at  Dubuque,  and  the  next 
morning  found  us  in  Chicago,  whence  we  returned 
to  New  York. 

It  was  not  that  summer  but  another  and  earlier 
summer  when  I  was  again  in  peril  by  water,  and 
when  for  the  third  time  in  my  life  I  had  the  Vision 
of  Sudden  Death.  I  was  making  the  trip  from  the 
Thousand  Isles  to  Montreal,  and  it  was  a  season  of 
heavy  forest-fires.  Once  on  our  way  to  the  Thou- 


UNDERGRADUATE   DAYS  119 

sand  Isles,  our  train  had  run  thru  blazing  woods  that 
threatened  the  track;  and  after  leaving  the  Thou- 
sand Isles  we  had  our  horizon  obscured  by  lowering 
banks  of  smoke.  When  we  took  on  the  aged  Indian 
pilot  who  was  to  guide  us  thru  the  Lachine  Rapids, 
the  twilight  was  dim  and  murky.  As  a  result  of 
this  failure  of  light,  the  pilot  slightly  swerved  from 
his  true  course,  and  the  boat  crashed  on  a  ledge 
of  rocks  when  we  had  less  than  a  hundred  yards 
before  we  came  to  smooth  water,  and  when  we  were 
in  full  view  of  the  Montreal  bridge.  The  bottom  of 
the  boat  was  so  badly  broken  that  it  was  impossible 
to  back  off  and  seek  the  channel  again.  So  we  re- 
mained there  all  night,  trying  to  prevent  the  water 
from  rising  any  higher  in  our  shallow  hold  by  stuffing 
mattresses  into  the  breaks.  In  the  early  morning 
another  boat  came  alongside  and  we  were  taken  off 
and  carried  to  Montreal,  leaving  our  steamer  stuck 
on  the  rocky  ledge.  I  have  been  told  that  it  was 
impossible  to  rescue  her  from  this  position,  so  that 
she  had  to  be  dismantled  and  her  bones  abandoned, 
to  be  picked  by  wind  and  wave,  winter  after  winter. 

IV 

The  rest  of  the  summer  of  1869  I  spent  with  my 
parents  at  Newport.  In  the  fall  I  returned  to  Co- 
lumbia for  my  junior  year,  which  passed  unevent- 
fully; and  in  the  summer  of  1870  we  all  went  to 
Europe  for  three  months.  I  had  to  remain  behind 
for  several  weeks  to  take  the  examinations,  going 
over  by  myself  on  the  Scotia  in  time  to  spend  the 


120  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Fourth  of  July  in  London.  Arriving  early  in  June, 
my  father  and  my  mother  saw  the  season  at  its 
height;  and  one  of  their  experiences  deserves  men- 
tion. 

In  the  'Recollections  Grave  and  Gay'  of  Mrs. 
Burton  Harrison,  whose  husband  had  been  private 
secretary  to  Jefferson  Davis,  we  are  told  that  the 
winning  of  the  battle  of  Bull  Run  was  due  to  a 
warning  sent  to  the  Confederates  by  a  lady  living 
in  Washington: 

McDowell  has  certainly  been  ordered  to  advance  on 
the  16th.  R.  O.  G. 

Mrs.  G.  (there  is  no  need  now  to  betray  the 
name)  was  a  lady  of  the  highest  social  position  in 
Washington;  and  at  the  outbreak  of  the  war  she 
was  frequently  able  to  transmit  invaluable  informa- 
tion to  the  Confederate  authorities.  In  time  she 
was  discovered  and  sent  thru  the  lines.  She  took  a 
returning  blockade-runner  and  went  to  London, 
where  she  was  joined  by  a  daughter,  and  where  she 
was  most  warmly  received  in  the  best  society  of  the 
British  capital,  then  overwhelmingly  Southern  in  its 
sympathies.  She  raised  money  for  the  Southern 
cause;  she  purchased  quinine  and  other  necessities; 
and  she  took  passage  back  on  another  blockade- 
runner.  Off  the  North  Carolina  coast  the  ship  was 
chased  by  a  United  States  vessel,  and  in  trying  to 
escape,  it  was  run  aground.  The  passengers  and  the 
crew  took  to  the  boats  and  tried  to  make  a  landing 
thru  the  surf.  Mrs.  G.  fastened  to  her  person  the 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS 

gold  she  was  bringing  in;  and  when  her  boat  was 
upset  in  the  breakers  the  weight  of  it  kept  her  from 
rising,  so  that  she  was  drowned. 

The  daughter  who  had  been  with  Mrs.  G.  in 
London  was  the  wife  of  an  officer  in  the  United  States 
army.  When  he  was  stationed  at  Fort  Adams,  his 
wife  and  my  mother  became  intimate  friends  dur- 
ing the  summers  of  1868  and  1869.  She  gave  my 
mother  letters  of  introduction  to  some  of  the  friends 
by  whom  her  mother  had  been  so  cordially  received 
half  a  dozen  years  earlier.  And  as  a  result  of  one 
of  these  letters  my  father  and  my  mother  went  to 
dine  one  evening  with  Lord  and  Lady  C.  H.  It  was 
only  a  few  weeks  after  the  publication  of  Disraeli's 
novel  of  'Lothair,'  which  had  greatly  amused  my 
father  as  an  almost  photographic  and  phonographic 
revelation  of  the  British  aristocracy.  When  'Lo- 
thair'  chanced  to  come  up  in  the  course  of  his  con- 
versation with  his  hostess,  he  asked  if  it  was  true 
that  the  novelist  had  drawn  his  fictitious  characters 
from  real  persons,  and  so  closely  that  they  could  be 
identified. 

"Indeed,  he  did,"  responded  Lady  C.  H.  "He 
makes  no  secret  of  it.  And  it  is  rather  curious  that 
you  should  have  raised  that  question,  since  it  hap- 
pens that  nearly  all  of  the  originals  of  'Lothair'  are 
gathered  here  to-night." 

Then  she  called  the  roll  of  the  leading  figures  in 
Disraeli's  fiction,  identifying  each  of  them  with  one 
or  another  of  the  guests  around  the  table.  As  my 
father  said  afterward,  it  gave  him  a  strange  sensa- 
tion ;  he  said  he  did  not  know  whether  he  was  dining 


THESE  MANY  YEARS 

with  the  unreal  characters  of  Disraeli's  novel,  or 
with  the  real  characters  of  that  other  interesting 
work  of  fiction,  Burke's  'Peerage.' 

I  did  not  arrive  in  London  until  after  the  family 
had  gone  over  to  Paris,  and  there  I  joined  them  a 
day  or  two  before  war  was  declared  with  Prussia. 
My  most  striking  recollection  of  those  days  of  ner- 
vous tension  was  the  impressive  effect  of  the  singing 
of  the  'Marseillaise'  by  bands  of  excited  men  at 
all  hours  of  the  day  and  night.  Thruout  the  eigh- 
teen years  of  the  shabby  and  shoddy  Second  Empire, 
the  fiery  lyric  of  the  Revolution  had  been  under  an 
interdict;  and  it  was  never  heard  in  public.  But 
now  in  the  need  to  arouse  the  martial  ardor  of  the 
people,  the  ban  was  taken  off,  and  the  spirit  of  the 
French  at  once  expressed  itself  in  the  soul-stirring 
stanzas  of  the  'Marseillaise,'  as  I  had  heard  the 
spirit  of  the  Americans  a  decade  earlier  find  voice 
in  the  sledge-hammer  rhythm  of  'John  Brown's 
Body.' 

Shortly  after  the  declaration  of  war  we  left  Paris 
and  made  our  way  by  devious  routes  to  Schwalbach 
near  Wiesbaden,  where  my  mother  took  a  cure. 
Then  we  went  down  to  Switzerland.  I  recall  that 
on  our  railroad  journeys  thru  Germany  our  cars 
were  held  up  more  than  once,  and  sometimes  for 
several  hours  at  a  time,  to  permit  the  passage  of 
trains  bearing  troops  and  supplies  to  the  French 
frontier.  Both  at  Schwalbach  and  at  Wiesbaden 
we  could  not  but  notice  the  absence  of  almost  every 
man  between  the  ages  of  twenty  and  thirty. 

In  August  we  were  comfortably  settled  at  Vevey 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  123 

for  a  stay  of  several  weeks,  until  it  became  evident 
that  the  French  were  constantly  getting  the  worst 
of  the  struggle,  and  that  the  Germans  were  steadily 
clearing  their  path  toward  Paris.  If  we  meant  to 
collect  our  belongings  and  to  get  across  to  Great 
Britain  on  our  way  home,  we  had  better  not  delay. 
So  we  started  suddenly  for  Paris,  reaching  there 
only  a  day  or  two  before  the  battle  of  Sedan.  We 
went  to  the  Hotel  Bristol  on  the  corner  of  the  Place 
Vendome  and  the  Rue  Castiglione,  in  front  of  Napo- 
leon's column.  Paris  was  in  a  state  of  feverish  un- 
rest; mounted  military  messengers  were  constantly 
galloping  thru  the  Place  Vendome;  all  sorts  of  dis- 
quieting rumors  were  in  circulation;  and  even  be- 
fore the  actual  news  of  the  surrender  at  Sedan  had 
become  public,  there  was  an  oppressive  atmosphere 
of  impending  disaster,  very  different  from  that  of  a 
few  weeks  earlier,  when  the  mob  was  frantically 
shouting:  "On  to  Berlin  !" 

On  that  memorable  Sunday,  the  4th  of  Septem- 
ber, when  the  populace  first  learned  the  full  extent 
of  the  defeat  which  had  befallen  the  army,  we  found 
the  streets  sprinkled  with  groups  of  men  talking  far 
less  loudly  than  on  any  preceding  day.  In  the 
morning  we  went  to  the  American  Church,  and  as 
we  came  back  down  the  Champs  Elysees  we  felt  as 
tho  a  sudden  quiet 'had  fallen  on  the  city.  When 
we  crossed  the  Place  de  la  Concorde  we  could  see 
on  the  other  side  of  the  river  a  surging  mass  of  men 
surrounding  the  Corps  Legislatif .  At  the  top  of  the 
broad  flight  of  steps  leading  up  to  the  columned  por- 
tico we  could  make  out  the  figure  of  a  single  speaker 


124  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

in  response  to  whose  eloquence  the  crowd  broke  into 
shouts  which  came  to  us  faintly  across  the  bridge. 

In  later  years,  when  I  first  saw  the  statue  of  Gam- 
betta  in  the  Place  du  Carrousel,  representing  him 
with  uplifted  arm  in  the  act  of  proclaiming  the  re- 
public, I  persuaded  myself  —  or  to  put  it  more  ac- 
curately, I  did  not  doubt  —  that  our  swift  passage 
across  the  Place  de  la  Concorde  at  a  little  after  twelve 
on  September  4th  had  enabled  us  to  behold  the  im- 
passioned orator  at  the  very  moment  when  he  was 
declaring  the  downfall  of  the  Empire.  I  felt  quite 
as  certain  of  this  as  that  I  had  been  a  witness  of  the 
famous  march  of  the  Seventh  Regiment  in  the  first 
week  of  the  Civil  War.  And  I  was  as  completely 
mistaken  in  the  one  case  as  in  the  other,  since  it 
was  not  until  about  four  in  the  afternoon  that  Gam- 
betta  made  the  speech  to  the  people. 

Yet  even  if  the  formal  pronouncement  of  the  re- 
public was  a  little  delayed,  we  discovered  when 
our  carriage  drew  up  before  the  Hotel  Bristol,  that 
the  Empire  had  no  longer  any  friends  willing  to 
stand  up  to  be  counted.  A  group  at  the  base  of  the 
Column  Vendome  was  engaged  in  tearing  down  the 
wreaths  of  immortelles  which  had  been  hanging  on 
its  railings.  I  went  out  and  tried  to  secure  one  as 
a  memento  of  the  historic  day;  but  I  was  too  late. 
When  I  returned  to  the  hotel  I  found  my  father  and 
my  mother  talking  to  the  Comte  de  Saint- Alb  in, 
with  whom  they  had  made  friends  during  their  stay 
in  Paris  at  the  time  of  the  Exposition,  three  years 
earlier.  M.  de  Saint-Albin  was  the  librarian  of  the 
Empress,  and  his  sister  was  the  wife  of  Achille 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  125 

Jubinal,  who  was  a  learned  investigator  of  French 
medieval  literature,  and  also  a  senator  of  the  Empire. 
Mme.  Jubinal  had  a  large  collection  of  fans,  and  her 
brother  had  come  by  appointment  to  take  us  to 
visit  this  collection.  As  a  devoted  imperialist  he 
was  disinclined  to  believe  the  bad  news  from  the 
seat  of  war;  and  he  saw  no  reason  why  we  should 
not  pay  the  promised  visit  to  his  sister. 

But  when  we  were  ushered  into  Mme.  Jubinal's 
drawing-room,  we  found  her  walking  to  and  fro 
and  wringing  her  hands  in  the  utmost  distress. 
There  had  been  an  all-night  session  of  the  Senate; 
and  it  was  now  one  in  the  afternoon,  and  she  had 
had  no  news  from  her  husband  since  the  preceding 
morning.  She  did  not  know  whether  he  was  alive 
or  dead.  She  feared  that  the  Palace  of  the  Senate 
might  have  been  taken  by  assault  and  that  the 
Parisian  mob  might  have  assassinated  all  the  known 
supporters  of  the  Empire.  We  withdrew  immedi- 
ately, of  course,  leaving  brother  and  sister  together. 
When  we  got  back  to  the  hotel  there  were  other  sig- 
nificant evidences  of  the  impending  change.  Men 
came  out  of  the  fashionable  shops  up  and  down  the 
short  Rue  de  Castiglione  with  blacking  brushes  in 
their  hands  to  besmear  the  golden  letters  of  the  in- 
scription on  their  portals,  asserting  that  they  were 
patented  purveyors  to  the  Emperor,  Fournisseurs 
brevetes  de  S.  M.  I'Empereur.  Other  men  emerged 
on  the  balconies  carrying  hammers  and  crowbars, 
with  which  they  wrenched  off  the  metal  coats  of 
arms  and  the  metal  letters  along  the  railings  an- 
nouncing their  connection  with  the  imperial  court. 


126  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

I  was  then  only  eighteen,  and  in  my  youthful 
Americanism  I  had  brought  with  me  an  American 
flag.  This  I  got  out  at  once  and  hung  to  the  rail- 
ings of  our  balcony  at  the  corner.  That  evening 
Hall,  the  friend  who  had  gone  with  me  to  the  Chip- 
pewa  Reservation  the  summer  before,  came  for  me, 
and  we  made  a  tour  of  the  boulevards,  rendered 
almost  impassable  by  the  crowd;  and  yet,  dense  as 
this  mass  was,  it  had  to  part  now  and  again  to  give 
passage  to  a  more  compact  phalanx  of  marchers  who 
were  chanting  the  'Marseillaise/  or  else  singing  a 
trivial  lyric  of  a  momentary  popularity,  with  the 
refrain:  "Si  c'est  de  la  canaille,  eh  bien,  fen  suis!" 
More  than  once  we  two  youngsters  were  roughly 
accosted  by  a  group  of  perfervid  patriots,  who 
sternly  admonished  us  to  shout  for  the  republic. 
"Eh,  vous  autres !  criez  done  'Vive  la  Republique!" 

As  I  look  back  on  that  day  of  pent  emotion  sud- 
denly released,  I  cannot  deny  that  the  Parisians  re- 
vealed themselves  then  in  a  state  not  unfairly  to  be 
described  as  hysteric.  And  yet  when  I  recall  the 
condition  of  the  streets  of  London  on  the  evening 
when  the  news  came  of  the  peace  which  brought  the 
Boer  War  to  an  end,  I  am  forced  to  confess  that  the 
Londoners  seemed  to  me  then  quite  as  hysteric  as 
the  Parisians  had  appeared  thirty  years  earlier. 
The  Parisians  were  the  more  excusable  of  the  two, 
yet  there  was  not  much  choice  between  them  and 
the  Londoners: 

The  Colonel's  lady 
And  Judy  O'Grady 
Are  sisters  under  their  skins. 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  127 

When  once  we  knew  that  the  Emperor  had  sur- 
rendered his  army  and  that  there  was  nothing  to 
oppose  the  advance  of  the  Germans  on  Paris,  we 
made  swift  preparation  for  departure.  Actually  we 
left  Paris  on  one  of  the  last  trains  permitted  to  get 
thru  to  Boulogne.  And  after  a  brief  stay  in  London 
we  took  ship  for  New  York. 


In  our  senior  year  at  Columbia  we  felt  the  first 
stirrings  of  the  movement  which  in  the  past  fifty 
years  has  transformed  the  curriculum  of  every 
American  college.  For  the  first  time  we  were  al- 
lowed a  few  rigidly  restricted  options;  we  might 
make  a  choice  between  Greek  and  the  calculus,  for 
example,  and  between  Latin  and  physics.  As  I  had 
amused  myself  in  Paris  as  a  boy  with  elementary 
electrical  experiments,  having  possessed  myself  of 
a  toy  Ruhmkorf  coil  and  a  few  diminutive  Giesler 
tubes,  I  chose  physics;  and  I  was  rewarded  by  the 
pleasure  and  the  profit  of  hearing  Professor  Ogden 
N.  Rood  lecture  on  the  undulatory  theory,  and  of 
seeing  him  perform  illustrative  experiments.  In 
those  remote  days  all  instruction  was  didactic,  and 
no  one  had  ever  ventured  to  suggest  that  students 
should  themselves  weigh  and  measure  in  a  laboratory 
to  verify  their  own  observations.  Even  in  chem- 
istry we  were  never  permitted  to  touch  a  test-tube 
or  a  reagent  with  our  own  hands,  all  illustrations 
being  in  the  sole  charge  of  the  professor  of  chemistry, 
Charles  A.  Joy.  He  was  reported  to  have  absorbed 


128  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

all  the  latent  and  latest  science  of  Germany,  but  if 
he  had,  he  did  not  take  us  tyros  seriously,  and  his 
attempts  to  prove  his  assertions  were  always  a  little 
hit-or-miss  in  their  results.  We  respected  Professor 
Rood  as  a  true  man  of  science,  who  had  conducted 
original  investigations  and  made  contributions  of 
his  own,  whereas  we  held  Professor  Joy  in  tolerant 
contempt,  laughing  at  his  most  successful  experi- 
ment, which  we  used  to  call  the  Ignition  of  Friction- 
matches  on  Scientific  Principles. 

While  I  still  suffered  under  the  handicap  of  inade- 
quate preparation  in  the  classics,  I  was  not  behind 
my  classmates  in  the  new  scientific  subjects  which 
they  and  I  approached  together  for  the  first  time. 
Yet  I  was  pleasantly  surprised  to  discover  that  in 
the  final  ranking  of  the  senior  class  for  our  first 
year,  I  stood  in  almost  exactly  the  middle,  being 
fifteenth  out  of  thirty-one.  Stuyvesant  Fish  was 
third,  and  Oscar  Straus  was  seventh;  I  do  not 
now  recall  the  standing  of  two  other  members  of  the 
class,  Robert  Fulton  Cutting  and  Henry  Van  Rens- 
selaer  (who  turned  Roman  Catholic  a  few  years 
later,  becoming  first  a  Paulist  Father,  and  finally  a 
Jesuit).  How  I  attained  even  to  my  modest  posi- 
tion in  the  middle  of  the  class  I  do  not  now  know, 
since  I  was  not  more  diligent  in  study  than  I  had 
been  in  my  earlier  years.  Other  things  interested 
me  more  than  the  stated  duties  of  the  classroom.  I 
was  beginning  to  read  widely  and  more  intelligently, 
and  in  this  I  was  aided  by  a  list  of  books  which  my 
father  had  asked  Professor  Drisler  to  draw  up  for  my 
benefit.  There  were  a  dozen  or  a  score  volumes,  and 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  129 

my  father  gave  them  to  me  at  once.  Fortunately, 
they  were  of  various  kinds,  and  some  of  them, 
Whitney's  'Life  and  Growth  of  Language'  and  Bur- 
ton's 'Book-Hunter,'  were  not  appreciated  until  sev- 
eral years  later.  But  two  of  the  books  that  I  owe 
to  Professor  Drisler's  kindness  had  an  abiding  influ- 
ence. One  of  these  was  Matthew  Arnold's  'Essays 
in  Criticism,'  and  the  other  was  Lowell's  'Among 
My  Books,'  which  had  only  recently  appeared,  and 
which  led  me  eagerly  to  acquire  Lowell's  later  essays 
as  rapidly  as  they  were  published.  To  Arnold  and 
to  Lowell  I  owe  my  initiation  into  the  principles  and 
the  practice  of  criticism  —  an  initiation  aided  also 
by  a  fifth  volume  on  the  list,  Schlegel's  'Lectures  on 
Dramatic  Literature,'  which  helped  to  foster  a  more 
intelligent  interest  in  the  theater. 

Not  only  was  I  reading  more  widely  and  more 
wisely,  I  was  also  writing  assiduously,  giving  myself 
the  practice  in  composition  which  had  been  denied 
me  in  college.  During  the  week  or  ten  days  that  I 
had  spent  in  London  after  the  proclamation  of  the 
French  Republic  I  had  become  interested  in  a  daily 
called  the  Figaro,  supposed  to  be  subsidized  if  not 
supported  by  Napoleon.  It  was  edited  by  James 
Mortimer,  also  known  as  an  adapter  of  French 
plays.  Him  I  went  to  see,  and  he  invited  me  to 
send  him  weekly  or  semiweekly  letters  on  my  return 
to  New  York.  He  even  promised  to  pay  for  them9 
—  whenever  the  Figaro  should  be  in  a  condition  to 
indulge  in  such  a  luxury,  a  moment  which  never  ar- 
rived. Over  these  letters  I  toiled  for  hours,  criti- 
cizing with  juvenile  self-assurance  the  new  plays  and 


130  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

the  flew  books  which  appeared  during  the  following 
winter.  I  do  not  now  understand  why  any  editor 
should  have  printed  these  boyish  effusions;  to  his 
London  readers  they  could  have  had  but  little  inter- 
est; but  to  me  their  value  was  inestimable,  for  in 
composing  them  as  a  labor  of  love  I  taught  myself 
the  trade  of  writing  —  or  at  least  I  made  a  beginning 
toward  the  acquisition  of  the  difficult  craft  of  com- 
position. I  may  note  here  that  only  a  few  months 
after  I  became  its  New  York  correspondent  the 
London  Figaro  shrank  from  a  daily  into  a  weekly, 
devoting  itself  largely  to  theatrical  affairs,  and  hav- 
ing for  its  successive  dramatic  critics  Clement  Scott 
and  William  Archer. 

Nor  did  I  confine  myself  to  prose.  I  had  already 
adventured  myself  in  verse  in  a  few  translations 
from  Horace  and  from  Heine.  In  London  in  that 
same  summer  I  had  fallen  in  with  Frederick  Locker- 
Lampson's  unerring  selection  of  familiar  verse, 
'Lyra  Elegantiarum,'  and  this  had  led  me  to  pro- 
cure his  own  'London  Lyrics.'  By  the  latter  and 
by  Praed's  brilliant  poems  in  the  former,  I  had  been 
moved  to  imitation.  I  also  rimed  a  few  parodies, 
and  I  contributed  a  few  artificial  lyrics  to  the  mori- 
bund monthly  of  the  Columbia  undergraduates, 
which  was  pretentiously  entitled  Cap  and  Gown. 
When  Oscar  Straus  ran  for  governor  of  New  York 
in  1912,  more  than  one  of  the  biographical  sketches 
of  him  which  appeared  in  the  newspapers  asserted 
that  he  and  I  had  been  rivals  for  the  post  of  class- 
poet.  This  was  inaccurate,  as  his  poem  on  'Our 
Era'  had  been  delivered  at  an  exhibition  in  the 


UNDERGRADUATE  DAYS  131 

Academy  of  Music,  known  as  the  Students'  Semi- 
Annual;  and  it  was  on  our  class-day  in  the  early 
summer  of  1871,  I  found  myself  set  down  on  the 
program  as  designated  to  deliver  the  class-poem. 

I  have  recently  disinterred  it  and  read  it  again 
after  many  years  —  with  a  strange  resuscitation  of 
my  lost  youth.  Poem  it  was  not,  despite  the  affirma- 
tion on  the  program;  the  best  that  can  be  said  for 
it  is  that  it  was  a  serried  column  of  local  allusions, 
tagged  out  with  more  or  less  ingenious  rimes.  And 
yet,  poverty-stricken  as  it  was,  it  served  its  pur- 
pose then;  and  its  composition,  like  the  concocting 
of  my  other  experiments  in  verse,  served  another 
purpose  —  it  helped  me  to  a  firmer  command  over 
the  vocabulary,  and  made  it  easier  for  me  to  say 
what  I  had  to  say  when  I  returned  to  my  more 
natural  mode  of  expression,  plain  prose.  In  the  two- 
score  and  more  years  since  I  graduated  from  college 
I  have  only  infrequently  dropped  into  rime;  and  I 
have  never  published  a  volume  of  verse  —  altho  my 
sexagenarian  vanity  did  tempt  me  to  collect  a  few 
of  my  scattered  verses  into  a  privately  printed 
pamphlet,  'Fugitives  from  Justice,'  presented  to  less 
than  a  hundred  of  my  friends  on  my  sixtieth  birth- 
day. 

Yet  I  am  bound  to  set  down  here  the  fact  that 
when  Columbia  celebrated  in  1886  the  centenary  of 
its  reopening  after  the  Revolutionary  War,  to  which 
King's  College  had  contributed  Hamilton  and  Liv- 
ingston, Jay  and  Gouverneur  Morris,  I  received  a 
letter  from  President  Barnard,  asking  me  to  prepare 
a  poem  for  the  occasion.  I  appreciated  the  com- 


132  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

pliment  of  the  invitation;  but  I  had  learned  a  little 
wisdom  in  the  fifteen  years  since  I  had  rashly  stood 
up  in  the  twilight  of  class-day  to  read  my  straggling 
rimes,  and  so  I  smilingly  put  the  temptation  by  and 
regretfully  declined  the  proffered  place  of  honor. 


- 


CHAPTER    VII 
ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW 


WHEN  I  graduated  from  college  I  was  only 
nineteen;  my  father  did  not  need  me  in 
his  office;  and  he  did  want  me  to  fit  my- 
self as  fully  as  possible  for  the  management  of  the 
property  he  expected  me  to  control.  There  was 
then  no  graduate  school  in  any  American  university; 
and  therefore,  if  I  was  to  continue  my  studies,  there 
was  practically  no  opportunity  open  to  me  other 
than  that  offered  by  a  law  school.  I  felt  no  attrac- 
tion to  the  bar,  and  my  father  had  not  planned  a 
legal  career  for  me;  yet  it  was  plain  to  us  both  that 
an  acquaintance  with  the  law  could  not  fail  to  be 
useful  to  a  young  man  who  was  to  inherit  a  fortune, 
and  who  was  expected  to  go  into  politics,  then  as 
now  more  or  less  monopolized  by  lawyers.  Ac- 
cordingly, in  the  fall  of  1871  I  entered  the  Colum- 
bia Law  School,  which  was  then  housed  in  a  dingy 
dwelling  in  the  Colonnade  Row  of  Lafayette  Place, 
almost  opposite  the  Astor  Library. 

When  in  our  old  age  we  are  tempted  to  look  back 
longingly  at  the  conditions  of  our  youth,  and  to 
deplore  occasional  lapses  from  former  standards, 
we  ought  not  to  shut  our  eyes  to  the  obvious  evi- 
dence of  progress;  this  evidence  is  nowhere  more 

133 


134  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

obvious  than  in  the  organization  of  our  higher  edu- 
cation. In  the  remote  days  when  I  began  to  study 
law,  no  one  of  the  professional  schools,  whether  of 
law  or  medicine  or  theology,  had  yet  stiffened  its 
entrance  requirements  to  exclude  applicants  who 
had  not  received  at  least  the  beginnings  of  a  liberal 
education.  Indeed,  I  doubt  if  any  of  the  law  schools 
or  medical  schools  hesitated  then  to  admit  students 
who  had  not  completed  a  full  high  school  course. 
This  low  standard  of  admission,  and  a  correspond- 
ingly low  standard  for  graduation  may  be  ascribed 
most  probably  to  two  facts:  first,  that  these  pro- 
fessional schools  were  often  only  nominally  attached 
to  the  colleges  whose  names  they  had  borrowed, 
and  second,  that  they  were  hi  many  cases  wholly 
or  in  part  proprietary  —  that  is,  they  were  run  for 
the  profit  of  the  professors.  It  was  at  the  very  end 
of  the  nineteenth  century  that  the  College  of  Physi- 
cians and  Surgeons  ceased  to  be  a  money-making 
trade-school  absolutely  owned  by  its  faculty,  and 
became  an  integral  part  of  Columbia,  and  thereafter 
responsive  to  the  loftier  ideals  of  a  true  university 
spirit. 

The  Columbia  Law  School  when  I  entered  it  was 
a  semiproprietary  institution,  being  the  result  of  a 
partnership  between  the  college,  which  lent  its  name, 
and  the  warden,  Theodore  W.  D wight,  who  gave 
his  wide  reputation,  his  unflagging  energy,  and  his 
marvellous  power  of  exposition.  This  partnership 
was  profitable  to  the  college  since  there  were  many 
students  and  only  one  instructor.  It  is  true  that  in 
my  second  year  I  was  permitted  to  listen  to  an  in- 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW  135 

teresting  course  of  lectures  on  medical  jurisprudence 
given  by  Dr.  John  Ordronnaux.  But  all  other  in- 
struction was  imparted  by  Professor  Dwight  him- 
self, toiling  unceasingly.  The  course  was  then  lim- 
ited to  two  years;  and  except  for  a  few  weeks  we 
met  no  other  teacher  than  the  warden.  Nor  does 
this  bare  statement  measure  the  full  extent  of  his 
self-imposed  burden.  The  two  classes,  junior  and 
senior,  were  divided  each  into  two  sections,  one 
meeting  in  the  morning  and  the  other  in  the  after- 
noon —  the  second  being  intended  for  the  benefit 
of  the  students  who  were  giving  their  forenoons  to 
practical  service  in  law  offices.  This  imposed  upon 
Professor  Dwight  the  fatiguing  task  of  meeting  be- 
fore one  o'clock  the  two  morning  sections,  one  of 
the  juniors  and  one  of  the  seniors,  each  in  turn, 
and  then  of  facing  after  four  the  afternoon  sections 
of  these  two  separate  classes.  He  thus  took  upon 
himself  at  least  twenty  hours  of  classroom  instruc- 
tion, besides  carrying  on  most  efficiently  the  varied 
duties  of  administration. 

Under  these  conditions  it  is  plain  that  the  law 
school  did  not  then  proffer  instruction  in  jurispru- 
dence intended  to  make  its  graduates  masters  of 
the  whole  science  of  law,  but  that  it  was  not  un- 
fairly to  be  termed  rather  a  trade-school  for  lawyers, 
designed  simply  to  fit  them  to  earn  a  living  as  prac- 
titioners in  the  courts  of  New  York. 

Professor  Dwight  was  commonly  called  a  great 
teacher.  His  greatness  could  be  denied  by  nobody 
who  had  once  sat  at  his  feet.  But,  to  my  mind,  at 
least,  a  teacher  is  precisely  what  he  was  not  —  if  the 


136  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

art  of  teaching  requires  that  the  instructor  shall 
guide  the  student  to  work  independently,  to  discover 
principles  for  himself,  and  in  time  to  acquire  the 
power  of  applying  these  principles  to  the  manifold 
situations  which  may  confront  him.  It  is  not  un- 
fair to  say  that  Professor  Dwight  did  not  force  us 
to  do  our  own  thinking.  What  he  did  was  to  do 
our  thinking  for  us;  to  declare  to  us  the  principles; 
and  to  apply  them  himself  to  selected  situations. 
His  greatness  lay  in  the  marvellous  sharpness  with 
which  he  seized  the  essential  principles  of  the  law 
and  in  the  masterly  manner  in  which  he  elucidated 
them  before  us.  His  appeal  was  therefore  mainly 
to  our  memories.  For  his  gift  of  clarity  no  words 
of  praise  can  be  too  high.  Certainly  I  have  never 
listened  to  any  one  whose  skill  in  exposition  even 
approached  his.  He  was  so  clear,  he  made  every 
successive  point  so  acutely,  that  it  was  impossible 
not  to  follow  him  step  by  step,  and  to  absorb  day 
after  day  the  fundamentals  of  the  law.  After  more 
than  twoscore  years  I  find  that  I  can  recapture 
to-day  not  a  few  of  the  distinctions  that  he  declared 
to  us.  But  no  student  can  put  forth  his  whole 
strength  when  he  is  fed  exclusively  on  predigested 
food. 

There  were  text-books,  including  Blackstone's 
'  Commentaries/  of  course,  for  a  few  pages  in  which 
we  were  made  daily  responsible,  and  from  which  we 
were  called  upon  to  recite.  But  the  larger  part  of  our 
instruction  was  derived  from  Professor  Dwight's  own 
lectures,  upon  which  we  took  copious  notes.  In  our 
second  year  there  were  moot-courts  for  the  trial  of 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW  137 

imaginary  cases,  members  of  the  senior  class  being 
assigned  as  counsel  on  the  one  side  or  the  other, 
and  being  expected  to  prepare  the  cases  for  trial 
before  the  warden.  The  examinations  at  the  end 
of  each  of  the  two  years  were  oral,  each  of  us  being 
called  up  in  turn  and  questioned  by  Professor  Dwight 
sitting  alone.  And  when  I  consider  the  immense  re- 
sponsibility he  had  accepted,  I  marvel  the  more  at 
his  unfailing  courtesy,  at  his  constant  kindliness, 
and  at  the  ever-present  serenity  of  his  demeanor. 

n 

As  I  seek  to  interpret  the  dim  memories  of  my 
youth,  it  seems  to  me  that  during  my  three  years 
in  college  and  my  two  years  in  the  law  school,  I 
was  overcoming  the  unpopularity  which  I  recognize 
was  mine  in  my  early  boyhood,  and  which  lingered 
all  thru  my  later  school-days.  I  had  to  pay  the 
severe  penalty  of  being  the  only  son  of  indulgent 
parents;  and  there  was  indisputable  significance  in 
the  nickname  of  the  "Benecia  Boy"  bestowed  on 
me  at  Anthon's  before  I  was  ten;  it  testified  to  a 
displeasing  pugnacity  which  wore  away  slowly  at 
Churchill's  and  at  Charlier's,  as  my  undue  self- 
assertion  and  my  forthputting  aggressiveness  dimin- 
ished under  the  attrition  of  association  with  others 
of  my  own  years,  who  made  me  respect  their  equal 
rights  to  their  own  opinions. 

In  college  I  did  not  wait  long  for  election  to  the 
Greek  letter  society  in  which  most  of  my  school 
friends  were  already  members.  And  in  the  law 


138  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

school  I  was  one  of  a  dozen  or  more  who  met  fort- 
nightly at  each  other's  houses  to  discuss  a  simple 
supper,  and  also  various  topics  more  often  literary 
than  legal,  altho  we  chose  to  call  our  society  the 
Judge  and  Jury.  I  recall  that  at  one  of  our  gather- 
ings George  L.  Rives  climbed  up  into  the  family 
tree  of  the  Warringtons,  and  traced  for  us  the  des- 
cent of  the  affiliated  characters  who  appear  genera- 
tion after  generation  in  the  successive  novels  of 
Thackeray.  Among  the  other  members  of  the  J. 
and  J.  were  Hamilton  Fish,  who  had  been  my  room- 
mate during  my  first  year  at  Churchill's,  and  John 
Scott  Laughton,  who  was  to  be  my  most  intimate 
friend  for  several  years  thereafter,  and  in  fact  until 
he  removed  to  Washington  to  take  a  place  under  the 
Alabama  Claims  Commission,  kindly  procured  for 
him  by  Fish. 

In  the  fall  of  1871  came  the  exposure  and  the  ex- 
pulsion of  the  Tweed  Ring;  and  to  do  our  share 
before  the  decisive  election,  we  organized  in  the  law 
school  a  Young  Men's  Reform  Association,  which 
undertook  the  task  of  aiding  Tilden  in  preventing 
plural  voting.  The  present  admirable  registration 
law  of  New  York  had  not  then  been  passed,  and  to 
exclude  repeaters  from  the  polls  it  was  necessary  to 
prepare,  in  advance  and  by  a  house-to-house  can- 
vass, a  list  of  those  actually  entitled  to  vote.  Most 
of  this  work  was  turned  over  to  paid  experts;  but 
some  of  it  was  done  by  the  members  of  the  Young 
Men's  Reform  Association.  To  me  was  assigned  the 
block  bounded  by  Broadway,  Sixth  Avenue,  25th 
and  26th  Streets.  I  went  to  every  house  and  se- 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW  139 

cured  the  names  of  all  the  males  of  voting  age;  and 
two  of  my  experiences  may  be  worthy  of  record. 

At  one  residence  my  ring  was  answered  by  a  very 
alert  Irish  girl,  who  was  plainly  puzzled  by  my  un- 
usual errand.  I  asked  for  the  gentleman  of  the 
house.  He  was  not  at  home.  By  this  time,  as  a 
result  of  my  earlier  practice,  I  had  managed  to  get 
well  inside  the  main  hall.  I  asked  for  the  lady  of 
the  house,  if  she  was  at  home.  She  was  at  home  — 
but  what  did  I  want?  I  bade  the  servant  tell  her 
mistress  that  a  gentleman  wanted  to  speak  to  her. 
After  more  than  a  little  demur  the  girl  started  up- 
stairs, but  when  she  was  half-way  up  she  turned  and 
looked  at  me  suspiciously.  Then  she  came  down 
to  the  hat-rack  near  where  I  was  standing  in  the  hall 
and  took  possession  of  an  overcoat  which  she  car- 
ried with  her  as  she  went  up  again,  after  another 
dubious  inspection  of  the  waiting  visitor. 

At  another  ample  brownstone  house  the  door 
was  opened  by  an  affable  colored  man.  The  gentle- 
man of  the  house  was  not  in.  Then,  as  usual,  I  in- 
quired for  the  lady  of  the  house.  The  attendant 
answered  with  a  little  surprise  at  my  ignorance 
that  there  was  not  any  lady  of  the  house.  And  then 
from  the  front  parlor  a  tall  man  with  a  characteristic 
black  mustache  appeared  to  inquire  my  errand. 
When  I  had  explained,  he  said  that  Mr.  Ransom 
was  not  in,  and  that  nobody  slept  in  the  house  but 
three  of  the  negro  boys.  Then  I  knew  where  I  was 
—  in  one  of  the  most  famous  of  the  fashionable 
gambling-houses,  flourishing  unmolested  under  the 
"wide-open"  privileges  granted  by  the  Tammany 


140  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

authorities.  None  the  less  did  the  black-mustached 
dealer  .summon  the  negro  boys  and  tell  them  to  give 
me  their  names. 

During  the  summer  of  1872,  between  my  junior 
and  senior  years  at  the  law  school,  I  left  the  house 
which  my  father  had  taken  at  Tarrytown  (not  far 
from  Sunnyside,  where  Washington  Irving's  nieces 
were  still  living)  for  a  week's  trip  to  the  Thousand 
Isles  under  conditions  pleasantly  exciting  to  a  boy 
who  had  lived  thru  the  martial  fervor  of  the  Civil 
War.  One  of  the  largest  and  most  beautiful  of  the 
Thousand  Isles  had  been  chosen  for  his  summer 
home  by  George  M.  Pullman;  and  there  in  his  spa- 
cious house  he  indulged  in  a  liberal  hospitality. 
My  father's  brother  was  a  relative  by  marriage  of 
Mrs.  Pullman's,  and  in  August  he  was  invited  to  be 
a  guest  at  Pullman's  Island  during  the  week  when 
it  was  to  be  made  memorable  by  a  visit  from  Gen- 
eral Grant,  then  newly  nominated  for  his  second 
term  as  President  of  the  United  States.  On  this 
occasion  General  Grant  was  to  be  accompanied  by 
two  other  chiefs  of  the  Union  forces,  General  Sher- 
man and  General  Sheridan.  At  the  suggestion  of 
my  uncle,  Mr.  Pullman  graciously  included  me  in 
his  invitation. 

I  wish  that  I  could  here  set  down  a  richer  record 
of  those  three  men  of  action,  alike  in  their  simplicity 
of  manner  and  in  their  easiness  of  approach.  I  had 
a  few  words  with  each  of  them,  but  what  they  said, 
if  they  said  anything,  has  faded  from  my  recollection. 
What  does  float  at  the  top  of  my  memory  is  only  a 
rather  confused  impression  of  my  own  reverent 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW    141 

awe  as  I  stared  at  them  intently  whenever  occasion 
offered  —  and  also  my  juvenile  interest  in  the  loco- 
motive headlights  which  had  been  borrowed  to  il- 
luminate the  tiny  stage  set  up  in  a  little  clearing 
levelled  amid  the  trees  and  the  rocks  —  a  clearing 
which  served  also  as  a  dancing  floor  on  the  occasion 
of  the  ball  given  one  night  during  my  stay  in  honor 
of  the  President,  and  attended  by  the  cottagers  from 
all  the  islands  for  miles  up  and  down  the  St. 
Lawrence. 

Ill 

During  the  two  years  when  I  was  supposed  to  be 
absorbing  the  law,  I  was  increasingly  devoted  to 
the  drama  in  all  its  theatrical  manifestations.  I 
went  to  the  first  nights  of  new  plays  and  to  the  open- 
ing of  new  theaters.  As  an  undergraduate  I  had 
been  enabled  (thru  the  kindness  of  James  Renwick, 
one  of  the  architects  of  the  theater)  to  be  present 
at  the  opening  of  Booth's ;  this  was  in  1869  —  and 
exactly  forty  years  thereafter  I  was  invited  to  the 
opening  of  the  New  Theater,  an  enterprise  even 
more  ambitious  than  Edwin  Booth's,  and  not  more 
successful.  I  had  also  attended  the  first  perform- 
ance and  the  last  performance  of  the  theater  man- 
aged by  John  Brougham,  a  little  playhouse  behind 
the  Fifth  Avenue  Hotel,  afterward  entitled  the  Fifth 
Avenue  Theater,  and  later  rebuilt  by  Steele  Mac- 
kaye  as  the  Madison  Square.  As  the  Fifth  Avenue 
it  was  managed  by  Augustin  Daly  until  it  was  de- 
stroyed by  fire;  and  there  I  saw  a  long  sequence  of 
interesting  performances. 


142  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Daly  not  only  loved  the  theater  ardently,  he 
lived  for  it  alone;  he  had  inexhaustible  energy  and 
immense  ambition.  He  challenged  at  once  the 
hitherto  acknowledged  leadership  of  the  theater 
established  ten  years  earlier  by  J.  W.  Wallack,  and 
then  more  laxly  controlled  by  Lester  Wallack. 
Daly  gathered  a  strong  and  varied  company,  en- 
listing a  star  like  E.  L.  Davenport,  and  engaging 
refugees  from  Wallack's,  including  George  Holland. 
He  came  in  time  to  make  a  specialty  of  his  own 
adaptations  from  contemporary  Parisian  plays,  be- 
ginning with  the  'Froufrou'  of  Meilhac  and  Halevy, 
made  memorable  to  me  by  the  appealing  charm  of 
Agnes  Ethel.  It  was  in  one  or  another  of  the  pieces 
which  Daly  liked  to  proclaim  as  the  "Reigning 
Parisian  Sensation"  that  Clara  Morris  displayed  her 
uneven  but  indisputable  power.  But  Daly  was 
anxious  to  develop  American  dramatists  also,  and 
here  he  stood  in  most  complete  opposition  to  Lester 
Wallack  (a  native  of  New  York,  as  it  happened  by 
chance),  who  in  spite  of  all  temptations  to  belong 
to  other  nations  remained  an  Englishman,  and  who 
preferred  a  bald  British  adaptation  of  a  feeble  French 
piece  to  any  play  of  American  authorship.  It  was 
Daly  who  gave  Bronson  Howard  his  opportunity; 
and  it  was  at  Daly's  that  I  attended  the  first  night 
of  'Saratoga,'  a  highly  artificial  but  ingeniously 
amusing  farce,  which  Daly  advertised  as  "a  Comedy 
of  Contemporaneous  American  Character"  —  this 
being  precisely  what  it  was  not. 

Daly  was  very  catholic  in  his  taste,  eager  to  put 
on  any  play  which  pleased  him,  old  or  new,  Ameri- 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW  143 

can  or  British  or  French.  He  revived  the  'Good 
Natured  Man,'  for  example,  altho  he  could  not  have 
expected  it  to  please  nineteenth-century  audiences 
in  New  York  any  better  than  it  had  originally 
pleased  eighteenth-century  audiences  in  London. 
When  I  came  to  know  him  in  later  years,  I  asked 
why  he  had  taken  down  Goldsmith's  unsuccessful 
comedy  from  the  dusty  shelf  where  it  had  reposed 
ever  since  Halleck  and  Drake  had  collaborated  in 
riming  the  Croaker  poems.  "Oh,  I  did  it  because 
my  brother,  the  judge,  said  he  would  like  to  see  it 
acted,"  was  Daly's  answer.  "Of  course,  I  knew 
there  was  no  money  in  it."  This  reply  was  per- 
fectly characteristic;  Daly  wanted  to  make  money 
naturally  enough,  for  otherwise  he  could  not  have 
continued  to  give  himself  the  pleasure  of  bringing 
out  the  plays  which  took  his  fancy.  His  likings 
were  manifold,  including  tragedy  as  well  a£  comedy, 
operetta  as  well  as  farce  and  melodrama. 

It  was  at  Daly's  that  I  beheld  the  chirpy  veteran, 
Charles  J.  Mathews,  in  many  of  his  favorite  pieces, 
especially  in  'Cool  as  a  Cucumber,'  and  in  Planche's 
amusing  burlesque  entitled  the  'Golden  Fleece,'  in 
which  the  brisk  and  voluble  comedian  appeared 
as  the  extraneous  Chorus.  It  was  at  Daly's  that  I 
was  first  introduced  to  certain  of  Shakspere's  com- 
edies, altho  I  had  earlier  seen  the  'Midsummer 
Night's  Dream'  at  the  Olympic,  with  G.  L.  Fox  as 
Bottom.  When  Mrs.  Scott-Siddons  appeared  in 
America,  Daly  engaged  her  to  appear  as  Rosalind 
and  as  Viola,  supporting  her  fragile  personality  and 
her  attenuated  talent  by  the  full  strength  of  his 


144  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

company.  In  fact  my  own  memory  of  Mrs.  Scott- 
Siddons  as  Viola  is  now  pale  and  faint,  while  I  can 
still  recall  the  highly  colored  fun  of  Fanny  Daven- 
port as  the  rollicking  Maria.  "The  full  strength  of 
the  company"  is  no  empty  phrase  when  applied  to 
the  actors  Daly  had  collected  under  his  management, 
as  can  be  evidenced  by  the  fact  that  I  once  saw  the 
'School  for  Scandal'  performed  at  the  Fifth  Avenue 
on  an  evening  when  the  unemployed  members  of 
the  organization  were  giving  'London  Assurance' 
in  Newark.  Each  of  these  plays  calls  for  a  large 
and  competent  cast;  yet  I  must  confess  that  the 
effect  of  Sheridan's  masterpiece  was  somewhat  weak- 
ened by  the  absence  of  two  or  three  of  those  who 
were  appearing  elsewhere  in  Boucicault's  falsely 
glittering  fabrication. 

Altho  Shakspere  was  only  infrequently  presented 
at  Wallack's  Theater,  it  was  there  that  I  first  saw 
'Much  Ado  About  Nothing,'  with  Rose  Eytinge  as 
Beatrice  and  with  Benedick,  undertaken  by  Lester 
Wallack  himself,  adorned  with  the  sweeping  sable 
mustache  which  he  never  sacrificed  even  when  ap- 
pearing as  Captain  Absolute.  And  at  Booth's  I 
made  acquaintance  with  'Henry  VIII,'  revived  so 
that  Charlotte  Cushman  could  repeat  her  most 
touching  portrayal  of  Queen  Katherine;  and  I  can 
even  now  after  more  than  twoscore  years  thrill 
again  to  the  exquisite  pathos  of  her  "Be  husband  to 
me,  heaven  !"  And  'while  I  was  a  law  student  I  was 
present  at  the  opening  night  of  the  Union  Square 
Theater  under  the  management  of  A.  M.  Palmer, 
when  Agnes  Ethel  appeared  as  Agnes,  the  lovely 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW    145 

heroine  of  a  machine-made  piece  which  Sardou  had 
adroitly  composed  especially  for  her,  and  which  he 
subsequently  revised  for  performance  in  Paris  under 
the  name  of  'Andrea.'  As  acted  at  the  Union  Square 
it  was  a  slight  and  sketchy  play,  owing  all  its  attrac- 
tion to  the  charming  personality  of  Agnes  Ethel 
herself  —  at  least,  this  is  a  fair  inference  from  the 
fact  that  the  play  never  had  any  success  except 
when  she  appeared  in  it.  In  her  version  the  last 
act  of  the  comedy-drama  owed  much  of  its  effective- 
ness to  the  theatrical  ingenuity  of  Charles  Fechter, 
who  suggested  significant  departures  from  Sardou's 
manuscript. 

Several  years  earlier  my  father  had  been  one  of 
the  shareholders  in  a  theater  which  Fechter  was 
afterward  to  manage,  and  which  he  was  to  call  the 
Lyceum.  It  was  later  known  as  the  Fourteenth 
Street  Theater;  and  it  was  originally  called  the 
French  Theater,  being  intended  for  a  French  com- 
pany which  should  present  a  changing  repertory  of 
current  and  standard  plays.  When  this  experiment 
failed  from  lack  of  support,  the  house  did  not  dis- 
avow its  name;  as  it  was  taken  over  by  "Colonel" 
Bateman,  the  husband  of  the  authoress  of  an  early 
American  comedy,  'Self,'  and  the  father  of  the 
Bateman  Sisters,  the  elder  of  whom,  Kate,  had  been 
triumphantly  successful  as  Leah  in  Daly's  adapta- 
tion of  Mosenthal's  'Deborah.'  Bateman  imported 
a  skilfully  recruited  opera-bouffe  troupe,  which  in- 
troduced to  our  public  the  'Grande  Duchesse  de 
Gerolstein,'  the  'Belle  Helene,'  and  several  other  of 
the  satirically  humorous  fantasies  that  Meilhac 


146  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

and  Hal£vy  had  written  to  be  set  to  lilting  music  by 
Offenbach.  The  prima  donna  was  at  first  Tostee, 
who  seemed  to  me  in  the  'Grande  Duchesse'  to  be 
worthy  of  comparison  with  Schneider,  whom  I  had 
seen  in  the  part  in  Paris  during  the  exposition  of 
1867.  Tostee  was  followed  by  Paola-Marie  and 
Irma,  and  later  by  Marie  Aimee,  perhaps  the  most 
accomplished  of  the  three,  with  a  brilliancy  of  fun, 
and  also  with  an  unexpected  power  of  pathos  dis- 
played discreetly  in  Perichole's  letter  song,  "Adieu, 
mon  cher  amant." 

When  Bateman  took  the  Lyceum  in  London  to 
exploit  his  daughter  Kate,  and  unexpectedly  to  dis- 
close the  intensity  of  Henry  Irving  by  producing 
the  'Bells,'  the  fascinating  field  of  opera-bouffe  was 
left  to  the  elder  Grau  (whose  nephew,  Maurice, 
afterward  the  manager  of  the  Metropolitan  Opera 
House,  was  my  classmate  in  the  Columbia  Law 
School).  His  company  was  headed  by  Desclauzas, 
and  its  most  profitable  appearances  were  in  '  Gene- 
vie  ve  de  Brabant,'  with  its  immensely  and  absurdly 
popular  duet  for  two  gens  d'armes.  How  it  was  that 
I  was  able  to  penetrate  into  the  sacred  precincts  I 
cannot  now  explain;  but  I  do  remember  that  I  was 
permitted  to  be  present  more  than  once  at  the 
rehearsals. 

IV 

As  it  happened,  I  had  an  even  more  intimate, 
altho  unsuspected,  relation  to  the  Grau  enterprise, 
because  I  translated  the  libretto  of  'Chilperic,'  to 
be  vended  in  the  lobbies  as  the  book  of  the  opera. 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW     147 

This  early  appearance  between  the  covers  of  a 
pamphlet  was  strictly  anonymous,  and  I  cannot  fix 
the  year  of  it,  as  my  copy  of  the  libretto,  possibly 
the  sole  survivor,  has  not  even  a  dated  copyright 
notice.  It  must  have  been  when  I  was  about  seven- 
teen or  eighteen. 

In  this  specimen  of  unremunerated  hackwork  I 
had  for  a  collaborator  my  schoolfellow,  Francis  S. 
Saltus,  who  was  responsible  for  rendering  the  French 
lyrics  into  English  rimes,  and  who  left  to  me  only 
the  humbler  task  of  turning  Herve's  violently  ec- 
centric dialog  into  humdrum  English.  Probably  it 
was  Saltus,  intensely  enamored  of  all  the  lighter 
forms  of  music,  and  already  resolved  to  write  a  life 
of  Donizetti  (never  to  be  written  by  him),  who  had 
originally  undertaken  this  translation  of  'Chilperic,' 
and  who  had  enlisted  me  to  help  him  out  with  the 
pedestrian  prose,  always  less  tempting  to  his  feath- 
ered pen. 

Quite  possibly  it  was  this  anonymous  translation 
which  encouraged  me  to  attempt  an  adaptation  not 
for  sale  at  the  doors  of  a  theater,  but  destined  for 
its  stage.  I  took  a  protean  farce,  the  *  Conferences 
chez  Beaubichon,'  and  I  Americanized  it  as  best  I 
could.  It  had  been  contrived  to  display  the  ver- 
satility of  a  comic  actor  of  the  Varietes,  and  it  per- 
mitted him  to  assume  four  contrasting  characters 
in  the  course  of  a  single  act.  When  I  had  done  the 
deed,  and  when  I  had  got  it  back  from  the  theatrical 
copyist,  with  all  its  stage  business  duly  underscored 
in  red  ink,  I  sent  it  to  Stuart  Robson.  This  was  a 
most  infelicitous  choice,  since  Robson  was  probably 


148  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

the  least  varied  actor  it  has  ever  been  my  fate  to 
behold,  owing  such  reputation  as  he  had  to  the 
quaintness  of  his  personality,  unchangeable  and  un- 
concealable  whatever  the  character  might  be. 

Yet  absurd  as  was  my  choice  of  a  performer  for 
the  privilege  of  producing  my  borrowed  playlet,  it 
was  not  altogether  a  mistake,  since  the  quadruple 
make-up  to  be  assumed  by  the  impersonator  of  the 
comic  hero  had  an  irresistible  appeal  for  the  actor 
who  could  never  be  other  than  himself;  and  a  long 
blue  playbill,  preciously  preserved  thru  all  these 
many  years  and  lying  before  me  as  I  write,  reminds 
me  that  at  the  Academy  of  Music  in  Indianapolis 
on  Friday,  October  13,  1871,  for  the  relief  of  the 
sufferers  by  the  Chicago  fire,  Stuart  Robson  appeared 
in  four  one-act  plays,  the  third  being  "a  dramatic 
eccentricity  entitled  ( Very  Odd '  for  the  first  time,  in 
any  city."  Honesty  compels  me  to  record  that  it 
was  then  performed  —  on  Friday,  the  13th  —  for  the 
last  time  in  any  city. 

A  year  or  two  later  I  adapted  another  French 
piece  in  one  act,  the  'Serment  d 'Horace'  of  Henry 
Miirger.  While  I  retained  the  ingenious  construc- 
tion of  the  brisk  and  bustling  original,  I  dealt 
freely  with  the  dialog,  and  I  localized  the  plot,  ar- 
bitrarily transferring  the  action  from  Paris  to  New 
York,  as  was  the  fashion  in  those  distant  days  when 
the  drama  of  the  English  language  drew  its  suste- 
nance from  the  French.  I  do  not  believe  that '  Frank 
Wylde'  was  ever  seen  on  the  professional  stage,  but 
as  I  published  it  in  a  magazine,  and  later  in  a  collec- 
tion of  'Comedies  for  Amateur  Acting,'  it  was 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW  149 

speedily  taken  up  by  amateurs,  who  performed  it 
again  and  again.  It  was  long  a  favorite  with  the 
Comedy  Club  of  New  York,  and  Frank  Wylde 
was  repeatedly  impersonated  by  Evert  Jansen 
Wendell. 

These  two  adaptations  were  the  natural  result, 
first  of  my  intense  ambition  to  become  a  playwright, 
and  second  of  my  incessant,  study  of  the  contem- 
porary French  drama.  I  read  all  the  important 
plays  produced  in  Paris  as  fast  as  they  were  pub- 
lished; and  I  pushed  back  my  researches  to  the 
masterpieces  of  the  romanticist  movement  of  1830. 
In  fact,  I  read  widely  in  the  whole  range  of  the  in- 
comparable dramatic  literature  of  France,  neglect- 
ing at  that  time  the  manifold  manifestations  of 
English  imaginative  energy  in  the  Elizabethan 
period.  From  the  French  drama  I  was  led  to  the 
Spanish,  which  I  approached  in  French  translations, 
as  my  own  Spanish  was  but  a  younger  brother's  por- 
tion. I  was  taken  captive  by  the  inventive  ingenu- 
ity of  Lope  de  Vega  and  of  Calderon.  To  this  study 
I  was  stimulated  by  the  appetizing  little  book  on  the 
Spanish  drama  which  George  Henry  Lewes  had 
made  up  out  of  his  contributions  to  various  quarter- 
lies. Thus  I  was  led  to  the  more  solid  and  stately 
tomes  of  Ticknor's  monumental  history  of  Spanish 
literature.  Under  the  guidance  of  Schlegel  I  made 
incursions  into  the  drama  of  other  tongues;  and  in 
an  old  diary  I  find  a  prophetic  entry  made  in  Feb- 
ruary, 1873,  just  before  I  was  twenty-one,  solemnly 
recording  my  ambition  to  compose  a  'History  of 
Dramatic  Literature' — a  youthful  project  accom- 


150  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

plished  thirty  years  later,  since  it  was  in  October, 
1903,  that  I  published  a  book  on  the  'Development 
of  the  Drama.' 


And  all  this  time  I  was  supposed  to  be  studying 
law.  I  was  attending  the  lectures  regularly,  and  I 
was  reading  more  or  less  assiduously  the  assigned 
pages  of  Blackstone.  But  studying  was  exactly 
what  I  was  not  doing;  in  fact,  I  did  not  then  know 
what  real  study  meant.  I  was  still  taking  things 
easily,  scraping  thru  the  examinations  partly  by 
strenuous  cramming  at  the  last  moment,  and  partly 
by  sheer  good  luck.  To  me  law  was  not  a  bread- 
and-butter  profession  on  the  mastery  of  which  my 
future  depended;  it  was  only  an  elegant  accomplish- 
ment, likely  to  be  more  or  less  useful  to  me  when  I 
should  find  myself  in  possession  of  a  fortune.  I  had 
no  vital  interest  in  law,  in  fact  I  doubt  if  I  had  a 
vital  interest  in  anything.  For  "society,"  as  it  is 
called,  I  had  no  relish,  altho  I  "went  out"  more  or 
less.  I  was  glad  always  when  I  met  a  man  of  letters; 
and  I  recall  that  there  came  to  my  father's  house  at 
one  time  or  another  John  Hay  and  Richard  Grant 
White,  and  John  R.  Thompson  (who  had  been 
Poe's  successor  as  editor  of  the  Southern  Literary 
Messenger) . 

My  chief  interest  was  in  books,  and  more  especially 
in  play-books.  I  browsed  in  my  father's  library; 
and  I  can  recall  the  taking  down  of  every  succes- 
sive volume  of  an  interminable  series  of  the  British 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW    151 

Essayists,  all  the  pages  of  which  I  turned  with 
little  or  no  profit,  except  in  so  far  as  I  might  have 
unconsciously  absorbed  lessons  in  style.  I  had 
ceased  to  write  letters  to  the  London  Figaro;  and  I 
had  begun  to  compose  articles  which  I  would  send 
in  turn  to  every  one  of  the  few  American  magazines 
then  existing:  the  Atlantic,  the  Galaxy,  Harper's, 
Lippincott's,  and  Putnam's.  In  Harper's  we  were  all 
reading  'Middlemarch,'  as  George  Eliot's  leisurely 
analysis  of  English  provincial  life  appeared  month 
by  month  for  two  solid  years.  Putnam's  was  soon 
swallowed  up  by  the  new  Scribner's  Monthly.  The 
Galaxy  (which  later  sank  below  the  horizon  into  the 
Atlantic)  was  then  the  magazine  most  attractive  to 
me,  with  Colonel  J.  W.  De  Forest's  'Overland'  for 
its  serial,  with  the  earlier  short  stories  of  Henry 
James,  and  with  its  frequent  essays  by  Richard 
Grant  White  and  Junius  Henri  Browne. 

In  spite  of  my  devotion  to  the  drama,  my  earliest 
literary  efforts  were  not  on  theatrical  themes.  My 
browsing  among  books  had  awakened  an  interest  in 
what  I  suppose  must  be  called  the  Curiosities  of 
Literature,  since  that  is  the  title  consecrated  by  the 
elder  Disraeli.  I  rambled  thru  the  realm  of  parody; 
I  uttered  'Cursory  Notes  on  Swearing,'  and  I  made 
my  first  critical  investigations  in  the  field  of  familiar 
verse.  I  adventured  myself  into  humorous  poetry, 
imitating  as  best  I  could  the  punning  stanzas  of 
Hood,  and  the  coruscating  society  verse  of  Praed.  I 
had  succeeded  early  in  getting  a  few  bits  of  comic 
copy  accepted  by  a  short-lived  weekly  entitled 
Punchinello,  edited  by  Charles  Dawson  Shanly.  It 


152  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

was  one  of  the  many  infelicitous  attempts  to  mimic 
Punch  or  the  London  Charivari  —  itself,  as  its  full 
title  shows,  originally  an  imitation  of  a  Parisian 
paper.  I  believe  that  Shanly  had  been  connected 
with  two  earlier  efforts  to  transplant  to  America  the 
form  of  Punch  —  humorous  weeklies  soon  swept 
beneath  the  waters  of  oblivion.  One  of  these  was 
called  Mrs.  Grundy,  and  the  other  Vanity  Fair.  I 
discovered  later  that  Punchinello  owed  its  brief  ex- 
istence of  a  scant  half-year  to  a  fund  of  twenty  thou- 
sand dollars,  contributed  equally  by  the  two  lead- 
ers of  the  Erie  Ring,  Jay  Gould  and  Jim  Fiske,  and 
by  the  two  leaders  of  the  Tammany  Ring,  Peter  B. 
Sweeny  and  Bill  Tweed.  This  was  not  the  only 
occasion  when  these  predatory  chieftains  went  into 
partnership. 

While  I  was  still  at  the  law  school  my  contribu- 
tions to  the  magazines  were  rejected  with  exemplary 
speed.  In  the  'Critic'  Sheridan  tells  us  that  "when 
they  do  agree  on  the  stage  their  unanimity  is  won- 
derful," and  equally  wonderful  to  me  then  was  the 
unanimity  of  editors.  No  matter  how  laboriously 
I  might  feather  my  essays,  they  were  homing 
pigeons;  and  I  could  always  count  on  their  swift 
return.  With  the  modest  confidence  of  youth,  I 
was  but  little  discouraged;  and  while  one  article 
was  vainly  paying  its  round  of  visits  I  was  already 
engaged  upon  another. 

At  last  my  two  years'  attendance  at  the  law  school 
came  to  an  end.  I  was  only  two  months  more  than 
twenty-one  when  I  managed  somehow  to  answer  the 
questions  put  to  me  by  Professor  Dwight.  After  I 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW  153 

had  passed  the  examination,  and  before  the  Columbia 
commencement  at  which  I  was  to  receive  my  di- 
ploma, I  was  married  to  Miss  Ada  Smith  of  Lon- 
don; and  almost  immediately  I  left  America  to 
spend  my  honeymoon  in  Europe. 

We  went  to  London  and  to  Vienna,  for  the  exposi- 
tion. But  it  was  in  the  outskirts  of  Paris  that  I 
had  the  unforgettable  experience  which  comes  only 
once  in  the  life  of  every  author.  In  1870  my  father 
had  ordered  a  picture  from  Thomas  Couture  thru 
a  well-known  firm  of  picture-dealers,  to  whom  he 
had  paid  in  advance  half  of  the  price.  But  he  had 
not  received  his  painting;  and  in  that  summer  of 
1873  he  discovered  that  Couture  had  never  received 
any  of  the  money.  In  the  stress  of  the  Franco- 
Prussian  War,  the  Siege  of  Paris,  and  the  disorder 
of  the  Commune,  the  picture-dealers  had  diverted 
to  their  own  immediate  needs  the  advance  payment 
intrusted  to  them  to  transmit  to  the  artist.  Under 
pressure  they  proffered  some  sort  of  apology,  and 
paid  over  the  money  to  Couture,  who  had  stopped 
work  on  the  half-completed  picture.  My  father 
naturally  desired  to  see  his  purchase;  and  one  after- 
noon we  all  went  out  to  the  painter's  house  in  the 
environs.  And  there  on  a  table  in  Couture's  studio 
nay  eye  discovered  the  pale-green  covers  of  the  Gal- 
axy —  the  least  likely  of  all  periodicals  to  be  dis- 
playing its  verdure  in  the  home  of  an  artist  as  Gallic 
as  Couture.  It  was  the  number  for  August,  which 
I  had  not  yet  seen.  I  seized  it,  and  with  a  thrill  of 
unexpected  joy  I  discovered  my  own  name  in  the 
table  of  contents. 


154  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

There  I  was,  printed  in  the  pages  of  a  monthly 
magazine,  and  in  the  best  of  good  company.  While 
the  others  of  our  party  were  gazing  at  the  painting 
which  was  the  object  of  our  visit,  I  looked  at  the 
magazine  which  at  that  moment  had  a  larger  im- 
portance for  me;  and  I  wondered  how  a  number  of 
the  Galaxy  had  so  mysteriously  and  so  promptly 
wandered  to  that  strange  place.  The  explanation 
was  as  simple  as  that  of  most  mysteries  —  a  sister 
of  Colonel  Wm.  C.  Church,  the  editor  of  the  Galaxy, 
was  an  art  student  in  Couture's  studio,  and  it  was 
she  who  had  left  the  magazine  casually  where  I  had 
chanced  to  see  it. 

VI 

When  we  had  arrived  in  Paris  in  June,  1873,  I 
found  to  my  great  regret  that  I  was  too  late  to  see 
the  special  exhibition  of  books  and  prints  and  other 
objects  of  interest  connected  with  Moliere,  and  col- 
lected that  spring  to  commemorate  the  two  hun- 
dredth anniversary  of  his  death.  Six  years  earlier 
my  father  had  bought  one  of  the  cleverest  of  J.  L. 
Gerome's  painted  epigrams,  the  '  Moliere  chez  Louis 
XIV,'  depicting  the  apocryphal  breakfasting  of  the 
actor  with  the  monarch;  and  perhaps  it  was  the 
presence  of  this  painting  constantly  before  my  eyes 
which  had  awakened  my  ambition  to  write  a  biog- 
raphy of  Moliere  whenever  I  might  feel  myself  less 
incompetent  for  the  arduous  undertaking.  Altho  I 
did  prepare  one  brief  magazine  article  on  Moliere 
half-a-dozen  years  later,  and  altho  I  did  review  a 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW  155 

host  of  books  about  him  from  time  to  time,  I  was 
not  able  to  fulfil  my  wish  for  nearly  forty  years 
after  I  had  first  formed  it  in  1872,  as  my  study  of 
Moliere's  stage-craft  did  not  get  itself  into  print 
until  1910. 

While  we  were  in  Paris  I  went  frequently  to  the 
play,  delighting  more  especially  in  the  varied  per- 
formances of  the  Comedie  Frangaise,  but  not  neglect- 
ing the  other  theaters.  For  instance,  one  evening 
we  had  the  good  fortune  to  see  an  admirable  per- 
formance of  Sardou's  amusingly  ingenious  'Pattes 
de  Mouche,'  known  in  English  as  the  'Scrap  of 
Paper,'  and  to  be  accepted  as  the  most  glittering 
example  of  his  dramaturgic  dexterity.  The  clever 
hero  and  the  clever  heroine,  whose  duel  of  wits  sup- 
plies the  essential  strength  which  sustains  the  in- 
terest of  the  artificial  comedy,  were  undertaken  that 
evening  by  Raphael  Felix  and  by  Anais  Fargueil. 
Felix  was  a  brother  of  Rachel,  and  he  was  reputed  to 
be  a  dull  man  in  private  life,  altho  on  the  stage  he 
was  a  brilliant  impersonator  of  brilliant  men  of  the 
world.  Sardou  was  the  most  adroit  and  inventive 
of  stage-managers,  and  he  had  specially  trained 
Fargueil  to  interpret  his  very  clever  leading  ladies, 
teaching  her  (so  he  himself  once  told  Sarcey)  many 
of  the  histrionic  effects  which  he  had  observed  in 
Ristori,  a  past  mistress  of  all  the  tricks  of  the  trade. 
This  evening  at  the  Vaudeville  lingers  in  my  memory, 
not  only  because  of  the  liveliness  of  the  play  and  the 
perfect  team-work  of  the  cast,  but  also  because  we 
happened  in  one  of  the  intermissions  of  that  warm 
September  night  to  have  the  good  fortune  of  a 


156  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

pleasant  little  chat  with  the  Bancrofts  (afterward 
Sir  Squire  and  Lady  Bancroft),  who  were  then 
managing  the  Prince  of  Wales's  Theater,  the  play- 
house in  London  which  most  closely  resembled  the 
Vaudeville  in  Paris. 

One  other  recollection  of  that  summer  of  1873  may 
deserve  record.  On  our  way  back  from  Vienna  to 
Paris  we  went  to  Ischl  and  then  to  Lucerne.  That 
was  the  year  when  the  rack-and-pinion  railroad  up 
the  Rigi  was  opened  to  the  top;  and,  as  it  chanced, 
the  cars  went  up  to  the  Kulm  for  the  first  time  on 
July  14,  the  day  of  our  ascent.  We  were  passen- 
gers the  second  time  the  single  train  made  the 
journey  up;  we  enjoyed  the  marvellous  panorama 
of  ice-clad  peaks  unrolled  before  our  eyes  when  we 
stood  on  the  observation  tower;  and  then  we  went 
back  to  the  tiny  train  —  only  to  find  that  every  seat 
in  the  two  or  three  cars  had  been  taken  by  the 
sightseers  who  had  arrived  on  the  previous  trip.  It 
seemed  as  tho  we  should  have  to  wait  over  three  or 
four  hours  for  the  train  to  go  down  and  to  climb 
back;  and  this  would  have  upset  our  own  time- 
table, as  we  had  made  arrangements  to  leave  Lu- 
cerne that  afternoon. 

Fortunately  for  us,  this  was  the  first  day  of  the 
completed  railroad,  and  not  a  few  of  those  on  the 
top  of  the  mountain  had  been  carried  up  in  the 
earlier  manner,  in  chairs  slung  on  poles,  and  borne 
by  two  stout  porters.  Nowadays  these  outworn 
devices  have  disappeared,  driven  out  by  the  rail- 
road, which  saves  the  traveller  time  and  money. 
But  on  that  midsummer  afternoon  there  were  a 


ON  THE  THRESHOLD  OF  THE  LAW  157 

dozen  chairs  ranged  in  a  row,  with  their  bearers  eager 
to  be  hired.  I  engaged  two  of  them,  and  I  offered 
the  porters  to  double  their  usual  pay  if  they  could 
get  us  down  the  mountain  to  the  landing  on  the 
lake  at  Weggis  in  time  to  meet  the  boat  which  would 
have  picked  up  at  Vitznau  the  passengers  on  the 
overcrowded  cars.  The  bearers  jumped  at  the  offer 
and  we  started  off  at  once  under  the  amused  gaze 
of  the  occupants  of  the  train.  I  bought  an  alpen- 
stock, and  I  walked  down  all  the  steeper  places, 
letting  the  porters  relieve  each  other  in  carrying 
my  wife's  chair,  and  having  them  carry  me  only  on 
the  occasional  level  stretches.  I  doubt  whether 
any  chairs  had  ever  been  borne  down  the  steep 
sides  of  the  Rigi  as  rapidly  as  ours;  and  the  porters 
earned  their  extra  reward,  getting  us  to  the  lake-side 
at  Weggis  just  as  the  steamboat  from  Vitznau  was 
drawing  up  to  it.  And  I  can  see  again  the  surprise 
in  the  faces  of  the  passengers  on  the  boat  who  had 
been  passengers  on  the  train  when  they  perceived 
that  the  old-fashioned  chairs  had  been  swifter  than 
the  new-fangled  cars. 

Early  in  the  fall  we  returned  to  New  York  and 
took  a  house  at  Orange.  When  we  were  settled 
there  I  began  to  go  regularly  to  my  father's  office. 
I  was  twenty-one;  school  and  college  and  law  school 
were  behind  me,  and  before  me  a  career  totally 
unlike  that  which  my  father  had  planned  for  me, 
and  yet  far  better  fitted  to  my  taste  and  to  my 
capacity. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
NEW  YORK  IN  THE  EARLY  SEVENTIES 


I   HAD  not  been  making  the  morning  trip  from 
Orange  to  New  York  for  more  than  a  month 
when  I  discovered  there  was  little  or  nothing 
for  me  to  do  in  my  father's  office,  and  that,  in  fact, 
I  was  only  a  fifth  wheel,  useless  except  in  case  of 
accident.     Those  whom  I  found  already  engaged  in 
the  work  were  accustomed  to  carry  all  its  burdens. 
The  only  opportunities  open  to  me  were  those  of  a 
supplementary  office-boy,  or  of  a  more  or  less  need- 
less private  secretary  to  my  father. 

He  was  not  engaged  in  any  business  except  the 
management  of  his  own  property,  which  consisted 
almost  wholly  of  office-buildings  in  the  immediate 
vicinity  of  the  Stock  Exchange.  He  had  a  few 
other  buildings  in  the  more  mercantile  part  of 
Broadway;  but  most  of  his  holdings  were  in  the 
Wall  Street  neighborhood,  and  were  occupied  by 
bankers,  brokers,  and  lawyers.  The  1st  of  May 
was  then  the  annual  moving-day,  and  for  a  month 
or  two  earlier  my  father's  advertisement  proffered 
offices  in  Nos.  19  Wall  Street;  55  and  57  Exchange 
Place;  4,  6,  11,  17,  19,  21,  and  38  Broad  Street; 
17,  19,  34,  36,  49,  and  53  New  Street;  and  38,  39, 
40,  42,  57,  64,  66,  69,  71,  73,  78,  and  80  Broadway. 

158 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE  SEVENTIES     159 

This  was  an  imposing  list  of  buildings  to  belong  to 
one  man;  and  it  was  without  surprise  that  our  office 
was  not  infrequently  taken  to  be  a  real-estate 
broker's,  and  that  owners  of  other  property  came  in 
to  ask  us  to  take  charge  of  it.  All  these  buildings 
owned  by  my  father  in  1873  have  since  been  torn 
down  to  be  replaced  by  sky-scrapers.  Among  them 
are  the  towering  structures  known  as  the  Mills  Build- 
ing, the  Empire  Building,  the  Wilks  Building,  and 
the  Union  Trust  Building;  and  their  present  rentals 
are  several  times  what  they  were  when  my  father 
was  the  owner  of  the  land  on  which  they  stood. 

Yet  the  annual  returns  were  not  insignificant 
even  then,  as  his  rent-roll  in  the  year  when  I 
entered  the  office  was  more  than  half  a  million 
dollars.  It  is  true  that  these  properties  were  all 
more  or  less  mortgaged,  as  my  father  was  quite 
willing  to  pay  six  per  cent  —  the  customary  interest 
on  a  loan  in  those  days  —  in  the  certainty  that  he 
could  put  out  the  borrowed  money  to  better  advan- 
tage in  the  purchase  of  other  buildings  which  in 
his  hands  would  bring  in  ten  or  twenty  per  cent  on 
their  cost.  He  knew  also  that  he  could  retire  all 
his  mortgages  if  he  chose  from  the  rentals  of  four 
or  five  years.  But  he  did  not  so  choose,  as  he  had 
undertaken  to  complete  a  railroad  in  North  Carolina; 
and  this  enterprise  was  fatally  wrecked  by  the  panic 
of  1873.  My  father  raised  money  by  second  mort- 
gages and  by  selling  his  works  of  art  and  his  pic- 
tures (including  the  Couture  and  the  Gerome).  By 
stretching  his  credit  to  the  utmost  he  completed  the 
railroad,  only  to  find  that  it  was  little  more  profita- 


160  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

ble  as  a  whole  than  it  had  been  as  a  fragment.  In 
February,  1876,  the  situation  was  made  much  worse 
by  a  fire  which  destroyed  444  to  452  Broadway. 
And  thus  it  was  that  in  the  four  or  five  years  that  I 
remained  in  his  office,  the  years  that  followed  the 
panic  of  1873,  in  which  so  many  others  were  carried 
under,  he  was  forced  to  part  with  all  his  holdings  in 
New  York,  being  left  with  only  the  doubtful  securi- 
ties of  the  Southern  road. 

Only  when  his  property  had  finally  departed,  only 
when  the  deeds  to  the  new  purchasers  had  been 
signed,  sealed,  and  delivered,  did  we  realize  finally 
that  the  end  had  come.  Until  the  very  last  we  had 
kept  on  hoping  against  hope;  and  we  had  gone 
thru  an  endless  succession  of  fluctuations  of  feeling, 
now  believing  that  it  might  be  possible  to  pull  thru 
somehow  and  then  cast  down  suddenly  by  some 
unforeseen  turn  of  events.  Ten  years  after  these 
long  months  of  incessant  and  unavailing  struggle,  I 
read  the  'Rise  of  Silas  Lapham'  with  astonished  ad- 
miration for  the  miraculous  veracity  with  which 
Howells  had  represented  the  downfall  of  his  hero's 
fortunes  with  its  unending  alternations  of  hope  and 
despair,  until  at  last  he  is  left  in  no  doubt  as  to  his 
defeat. 

In  my  father's  case  the  situation  was  complicated 
by  a  series  of  intricate  lawsuits;  in  fact,  the  full  ex- 
tent of  his  losses  was  not  made  clear  to  him  until  a 
few  months  before  his  death  in  1887.  He  always 
believed  himself  to  be  richer  than  he  was ;  and  to  the 
very  end  he  had  high  hopes  for  the  future  when- 
ever the  tide  should  turn.  But  the  tide  did  not  turn, 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE  SEVENTIES     161 

for  when  his  estate  was  settled  we  found  that  he 
was  without  debts,  and  almost  without  assets.  In 
the  last  years  he  was  worn  by  constant  physical 
suffering,  and  harassed  by  the  returning  cycle  of 
financial  disappointments;  but  he  was  still  stout  of 
heart,  courageous,  and  cheerful.  When  he  died  he 
was  broken  in  health  but  unbroken  in  spirit. 

It  has  seemed  to  me  best  to  condense  into  these 
brief  paragraphs  the  record  of  a  long  struggle,  at 
the  end  of  which  I  found  myself  in  a  totally  different 
position  from  that  which  I  occupied  at  the  begin- 
ning. I  had  been  educated  to  be  an  administrator 
of  millions;  and  from  that  calling  I  was  entirely 
cut  off.  I  have  often  asked  myself  whether  the  loss 
of  the  wealth  I  had  expected  to  inherit  was  for  me 
a  bane  or  a  boon;  I  have  wondered  whether  my  later 
life  would  have  been  as  rich,  as  varied,  as  happy  as 
it  has  been,  if  I  had  been  permitted  to  practise  the 
profession  of  millionaire.  The  question  is  idle,  I 
suppose;  yet  I  cannot  help  believing  that  on  the 
whole  I  have  been  a  gainer  rather  than  a  loser  as 
the  result  of  the  departure  of  my  father's  fortune. 
The  possession  of  unearned  wealth  is  rarely  a  bless- 
ing; and  I  think  I  know  myself  well  enough  to  have 
serious  doubts  whether  for  me  it  might  not  have 
been  a  curse.  Quite  possibly  my  father's  money 
had  done  everything  it  could  for  me  when  it  gave  me 
all  the  opportunities  of  my  youth,  even  if  I  had  not 
profited  by  them  as  I  might;  and  when  it  faded 
away  finally  it  left  me  none  the  worse. 


162  THESE  MANY  YEARS 


II 

When  I  entered  it  my  father's  office  was  in  4  and 
6  Broad  Street,  next  to  the  corner  of  Wall  Street; 
and  a  few  months  later  it  was  removed  to  71  Broad- 
way, which  my  father  had  called  the  Empire  Build- 
ing. I  may  note  that  when  the  Sixth  Avenue  ele- 
vated railroad  was  constructed  (to  be  opened  in 
1878)  my  uncle's  cordial  relations  with  George  M. 
Pullman,  who  was  largely  instrumental  in  the 
building  of  the  road,  resulted  in  the  utilization  of 
the  main  hall  of  the  Empire  Building  as  a  thorofare 
for  the  passengers  who  desired  to  get  to  Broadway 
as  directly  as  possible.  Our  office  overlooked  the 
graveyard  of  Trinity;  and  I  often  spent  my  nooning 
in  its  restful  placidity,  sometimes  alone  and  some- 
times in  company  with  my  law-school  classmate, 
Laughton,  then  a  clerk  in  the  Subtreasury.  We 
often  planned  to  climb  the  tower  of  Trinity  to  the 
base  of  the  spire,  but  this  project  was  constantly 
postponed,  and  never  achieved  at  last.  More  than 
thirty  years  later  I  went  up  to  the  top  of  the  new 
Empire  Building,  the  stately  sky-scraper  which  had 
replaced  the  shabby  four-story  warehouses  my 
father  had  altered  into  offices;  and  when  I  came 
out  on  the  roof  I  found  myself  level  with  the  tip- 
top of  the  spire  of  Trinity,  to  the  base  of  which 
Laughton  and  I  had  planned  to  climb  for  a  view 
not  then  otherwise  attainable. 

In  those  remote  days  a  diploma  from  the  Columbia 
Law  School  entitled  its  possessor  to  admission  to 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE  SEVENTIES     163 

the  bar;  and  on  application  I  was  authorized  to 
practise  as  attorney  and  counsellor  at  law.  Of  this 
privilege  I  never  availed  myself  except  that  on  two 
or  three  occasions,  in  the  course  of  our  interminable 
litigations,  I  appeared  in  court  to  ask  for  postpone- 
ments. The  one  indisputable  benefit  I  derived 
from  my  stay  in  the  law  school  was  a  sincere  convic- 
tion that  I  did  not  know  law  enough  to  be  my  own 
lawyer.  I  have  never  been  attracted  to  the  practice 
of  law,  even  with  myself  as  a  sole  client.  And 
altho  I  spent  four  or  five  years  in  the  turmoil  of 
the  stock-market,  I  was  never  lured  into  "taking  a 
flier."  My  father's  stock-broker  tenants  would  often 
give  him  tips,  and  urge  him  to  risk  a  little  to  make 
a  large  profit;  but  he  always  refused  to  speculate. 
I  must  have  inherited  his  distaste  for  these  aleatory 
delights,  having  no  more  desire  as  a  young  man  to 
gamble  in  Wall  Street  than  I  had  had  as  a  lad  to 
gamble  at  Homburg  and  Baden-Baden. 

My  father  had  no  hesitation  in  venturing  his 
money  in  support  of  his  reasoned  opinion  as  to  the 
course  of  events  here  and  abroad  which  would  ulti- 
mately control  prices;  but  he  was  emphatic  in  deny- 
ing that  this  was  speculating.  He  refused  to  ad- 
mit that  his  earlier  operations  in  cotton  and  in  corn, 
in  breadstuffs,  and  in  hog-products  up  and  down  the 
Mississippi  were  fairly  to  be  termed  speculations. 
In  his  eyes  a  speculator  was  a  man  who  did  not  use 
his  brains,  relying  merely  on  brute  luck.  And  he 
held  it  unfair  to  dismiss  as  a  speculator  a  man  who 
exercised  his  imagination  to  interpret  the  world- 
wide conditions  which  would  necessarily  cause  the 


164  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

future  fall  or  rise  of  prices.  This  interpretative 
imagination  my  father  possessed  in  a  high  degree, 
and  conscious  of  its  possession  he  enjoyed  exercising 
it.  After  the  Civil  War  was  over  he  devoted  himself 
to  his  real  estate  and  kept  out  of  the  market;  but 
he  persevered  in  his  analysis  of  the  underlying  con- 
ditions. 

Twice  only  while  I  was  in  his  office,  and  then 
mainly  to  assist  me,  was  he  moved  to  profit  by  his 
insight;  and  on  both  of  these  occasions  he  took  me 
in  with  him.  Once  we  bought  cotton  and  once  we 
bought  mess-pork,  and  the  two  little  ventures  amply 
justified  his  foresight.  He  had  suggested  that  I  go 
in  to  "make  my  rent."  I  was  so  little  carried  away 
by  the  gambling  spirit  that  I  took  my  own  profit  as 
soon  as  my  half  of  our  gains  equalled  the  sum  I 
had  to  pay  my  landlord.  I  had  perfect  confidence 
in  my  father's  judgment  about  going  into  an  opera- 
tion, but  I  was  not  quite  so  assured  as  to  his  judg- 
ment about  coming  out,  since  he  was  ever  inclined 
to  be  oversanguine.  In  both  of  our  joint  opera- 
tions he  held  on  a  little  longer  than  I  did;  and  in 
neither  case  did  his  return  from  his  insight  equal 
mine. 

The  rent  that  I  made  by  these  ventures  went  to 
landlords  in  New  York,  for  we  had  spent  only  a 
winter  in  Orange.  On  our  return  to  the  city  we 
boarded  for  a  few  weeks  at  45  Fifth  Avenue,  in  a 
house  kept  by  a  sister  of  Bret  Harte,  then  in  the 
first  flush  of  his  success  in  the  East.  He  used  to 
come  to  his  sister's  house  for  his  letters;  and  to  my 
surprise  I  heard  her  children  greet  him  as  "Uncle 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE  SEVENTIES     165 

Frank"  —  a  greeting  which  reminded  me  that  on 
his  earlier  title-pages  he  had  signed  himself  "F. 
Bret  Harte."  Our  stay  in  this  boarding-house  was 
but  brief,  as  we  soon  took  a  house  in  East  20th  Street, 
between  Broadway  and  Fourth  Avenue,  almost  op- 
posite the  modest  dwelling  where  Colonel  Roosevelt 
was  then  living  as  a  boy.  In  1877  we  removed  to 
an  apartment  in  Stuyvesant  Square.  This  house  is 
recognizable  in  the  earlier  pages  of  Howells's  'Hazard 
of  New  Fortunes.'  When  we  went  there  it  already 
sheltered  Richard  Grant  White,  and  before  we 
moved  out  in  1881  it  had  become  the  home  of  H.  C. 
Bunner. 

I  suppose  that  Stanford  White  must  then  have 
been  residing  with  his  father,  but  I  do  not  recall 
ever  having  met  him  in  the  spacious  hall.  He  and 
McKim  and  William  R.  Mead  were  all  of  them  at 
one  time  or  another  in  the  office  of  H.  H.  Richard- 
son, who  was  a  tenant  of  my  father's  in  57  Broad- 
way; and  I  went  to  Richardson's  office  more  than 
once  to  present  the  monthly  bill  for  the  rent.  It  was 
in  this  humble  capacity  of  rent-collector  that  I  first 
met  Edmund  Clarence  Stedman,  then  a  member  of 
the  Stock  Exchange,  and  also  a  tenant  of  ours. 

Ill 

As  I  had  no  definite  duties  in  the  office,  I  did  all 
sorts  of  odd  jobs:  I  went  to  collect  the  rents;  I  re- 
wrote my  father's  letters,  as  his  impatient  hand- 
writing had  come  to  be  difficult  for  those  who  were 
not  used  to  it;  and  I  did  occasional  errands.  On 


166  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

one  of  those  errands  to  our  stationers  I  fell  into  talk 
with  the  senior  partner,  a  son  of  the  Beadle  who 
had  published  the  yellow-backed  Dime  Novels  I 
had  devoured  in  boarding-school.  The  chief  sale 
of  this  series  of  innocuous  but  exciting  fiction  had 
been  among  the  soldiers,  and  its  circulation  waned 
when  the  million  men  under  arms  in  1865  dwindled 
rapidly  to  a  scant  hundred  thousand.  Not  only 
did  the  sale  fall  off,  but  the  publishers  found  increas- 
ing difficulty  in  procuring  the  primitive  kind  of  tale 
which  alone  suited  the  simple  tastes  of  its  expectant 
customers.  Young  Beadle  told  me  in  the  course  of 
our  casual  talk  that  a  stranger  had  recently  entered 
his  father's  office  with  a  roll  of  manuscript  under 
his  arm  and  with  these  words  on  his  lips:  "Mr. 
Beadle,  you  have  published  two  hundred  and  fifty- 
three  Dime  Novels;  I  have  read  them  all;  and  I 
think  I  know  at  last  what  you  want.  Here's  a 
story  I  have  written  especially  for  you!"  And  as 
it  happened  this  modest  author's  confidence  was 
justified  and  his  tale  was  promptly  accepted. 

Having  no  absorbing  duties  in  the  office,  I  was  not 
diligent  in  attendance,  and  I  had  abundant  leisure 
for  my  own  writing.  I  continued  to  contribute  to 
the  Galaxy;  and  in  one  of  my  papers,  entitled  the 
'Parody  of  the  Period,'  I  quoted  a  scrap  of  rime 
by  George  W.  Cable,  then  an  unknown  newspaper 
man  in  New  Orleans  —  to  his  immediate  delight,  as 
this  was  the  first  occasion  when  anything  of  his  had 
received  any  recognition,  so  he  told  me  later  when 
I  came  to  have  the  privilege  of  his  friendship.  These 
earlier  Galaxy  articles  seem  to  me  now  rather  juvenile; 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE  SEVENTIES     167 

none  the  less  was  I  puffed  with  pride  when  my  name 
appeared  every  three  or  four  months  in  the  Galaxy's 
table  of  contents.  A  few  years  later  I  read  Douglas 
Jerrold's  gibe  against  a  youthful  writer  who  had 
made  a  premature  appearance  in  print,  to  the  effect 
that  "he  had  taken  down  the  shutters  before  he 
had  anything  to  put  in  the  shop- windows ";  and  I 
blushed  with  an  acute  perception  that  the  British 
wit  all  unknowingly  had  transfixed  me  with  his 
casual  shaft. 

I  became  in  time  an  occasional  contributor  also 
to  Appleton's  Journal,  edited  by  Oliver  Bell  Bunce 
(afterward  the  compiler  of  the  monitory  'Don't'); 
to  Lippincott's,  then  edited  by  John  Foster  Kirk, 
the  historian;  to  Leslie9 s  Popular  Monthly,  then 
edited  by  another  historian,  John  Gilmary  Shea; 
and  to  Scribner's  Monthly  (soon  to  become  the 
Century),  then  edited  by  J.  G.  Holland,  assisted  by 
Richard  Watson  Gilder.  I  have  kept  all  these  early 
efforts  at  magazining;  and  as  I  run  them  over  I 
note  that  I  was  slowly  giving  up  the  field  of  the 
curiosities  of  literature  and  centering  my  efforts 
more  and  more  on  topics  connected  with  the  theater. 
To  the  Atlantic,  then  edited  by  Howells,  and  to 
Harper's  I  did  not  win  admission  until  perhaps  half- 
a-dozen  years  after  I  had  begun  to  contribute  to  the 
Galaxy.  For  the  International  Review  (not  yet  taken 
in  charge  by  Henry  Cabot  Lodge  and  John  T. 
Morse)  I  wrote  several  signed  book-reviews;  and 
when  I  went  to  ask  for  payment  from  the  editor  — 
whose  name  I  now  forget  —  he  put  me  off  with  the 
assertion  that  the  contributors  to  his  magazine  re- 


168  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

ceived  a  twofold  reward:  first,  the  signal  honor  of 
appearing  in  its  pages,  and  second,  an  honorarium 
in  money,  the  exiguity  of  the  latter  being  propor- 
tioned to  the  altitude  of  the  former. 

The  monthly  magazines  were  not  many  in  the 
years  between  1871  and  1880,  nor  were  the  week- 
lies. The  daily  newspapers  of  New  York  were 
stronger  than  they  had  ever  been  before  or  than 
they  have  ever  been  since  —  stronger  in  the  ability 
and  in  the  character  of  the  men  who  were  making 
them.  I  do  not  think  that  I  err  in  believing  that 
metropolitan  journalism  touched  its  topmost  mark 
in  that  decade.  The  Evening  Post  was  still  edited 
by  William  Cullen  Bryant;  it  had  lost  John  Bigelow, 
but  it  retained  Parke  Godwin;  and  it  had  John  R. 
Thompson  for  its  literary  critic.  The  Times  had 
made  its  triumphant  exposure  of  the  Tweed  Ring, 
probably  as  notable  a  public  service  as  any  journal 
was  ever  able  to  render  to  its  constituency.  The 
World  was  directed  by  Manton  Marble,  and  it  had 
a  literary  flavor  not  unlike  that  of  the  Parisian 
papers.  Ivory  Chamberlain,  Wm.  Henry  Hurlbert 
(who  succeeded  Marble  as  editor  when  the  control 
of  the  paper  was  acquired  by  Jay  Gould),  and  Mont- 
gomery Schuyler  were  the  regular  editorial  writers, 
joined  on  occasion  by  Sidney  Webster  and  George 
Ticknor  Curtis.  The  literary  and  art  critic  was 
Wm.  C.  Brownell,  and  the  dramatic  critic  was  A. 
C.  Wheeler,  who  signed  "Nym  Crinkle"  (and  who 
still  revealed  a  certain  independence  of  judgment 
that  departed  later).  The  lighter  writers  were  Wm. 
L.  Alden,  R.  H.  Newell  ("Orpheus  C.  Kerr"), 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE  SEVENTIES     169 

and  George  T.  Lanigan,  the  author  of  the  delicious 
Fables  —  "anywhere,  anywhere  out  of  the  World." 
The  sporting  editor  was  Major  H.  G.  Crickmore  — 
"Krik"  —  a  man  who  won  the  sincere  regard  of  all 
who  came  to  know  him. 

Notable  as  was  the  staff  of  the  World,  it  was  not 
as  strong  or  as  solid  as  the  staff  of  the  Tribune  when 
Whitelaw  Reid  took  charge  after  Horace  Greeley's 
fatal  candidacy  of  the  presidency  in  1872.  Chief 
among  the  editorial  writers  was  John  Hay,  who  had 
for  associates  Noah  Brooks,  Isaac  H.  Bromley,  and 
Charles  T.  Congdon.  The  literary  critic  was  George 
Ripley,  the  founder  of  Brook  Farm;  the  art  critic 
was  Clarence  Cook;  the  musical  critic  was  John  R. 
G.  Hassard;  and  the  dramatic  critic  was  William 
Winter.  The  exchange  editor  was  Bronson  Howard. 
The  Washington  correspondent  was  Z.  L.  White; 
the  London  correspondent  was  G.  W.  Smalley;  and 
the  Paris  correspondent  was  Wm.  H.  Huntington. 
From  Paris  there  also  came  fortnightly  contributions 
from  Arsene  Houssaye  and  from  Henry  James. 
Louise  Chandler  Moulton  wrote  literary  letters  from 
Boston;  E.  V.  Smalley  reported  on  Western  condi- 
tions; and  Bayard  Taylor  roamed  at  large.  Nor  is 
this  list  complete,  since  it  ought  to  include  also 
E.  L.  Burlingame  and  C.  C.  Buel,  Kate  Field,  and 
"Gail  Hamilton."  Nor  can  omission  be  made  also 
of  the  fact  that  the  Tribune  had  the  habit  of  report- 
ing in  full  the  more  important  lectures  and  ad- 
dresses which  might  be  made  in  New  York,  such  as 
those  by  Huxley  and  by  Tyndall. 


170  THESE  MANY  YEARS 


IV 

A  weekly  paper  occupies  an  anomalous  position 
between  the  daily  and  the  monthly,  tending  some- 
times toward  journalism  pure  and  simple,  and  some- 
times striving  to  attain  standards  more  deliberately 
literary.  In  the  period  of  which  I  am  now  writing, 
altho  there  were  occasional  attempts  to  establish 
American  imitations  of  the  Saturday  Review  or  the 
Spectator,  the  more  abject  colonialism  of  twenty  or 
thirty  years  earlier  had  been  killed  by  the  Civil 
War.  My  mother  used  to  tell  me  that  the  one 
weekly  which  came  to  her  father's  house,  and  later 
to  her  own,  was  the  Albion,  the  organ  of  the  British 
who  had  migrated  to  America,  a  paper  as  exclusively 
insular  as  its  title  implied.  It  was  significant  of 
our  willingness  to  depend  upon  London  for  literature 
and  even  for  critical  evolution  of  American  authors, 
that  the  sole  weekly  which  penetrated  into  culti- 
vated circles  was  this  which  was  edited  by  Britons 
for  Britons,  altho  its  circulation  was  mainly  among 
Americans.  No  wonder  is  it  that  in  the  'Fable  for 
Critics'  in  1848  Lowell  had  protested  against  the 
writing  that 

suits  each  whisper  and  motion 
To  what  will  be  thought  of  it  over  the  ocean. 

Harper's  Weekly,  altho  originally  modelled  on  the 
Illustrated  London  News,  had  departed  widely  from 
its  prototype;  its  editorial  page  was  then  in  the  con- 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE  SEVENTIES     171 

trol  of  George  William  Curtis,  whose  political  and 
social  articles,  at  once  graceful  and  forceful,  were 
very  vigorously  supported  by  the  sledge-hammer 
cartoons  of  Thomas  Nast.  The  Independent,  edited 
by  Theodore  Tilton,.  had  its  many  readers,  but  as  I 
did  not  happen  to  be  among  them  then,  I  can  now 
supply  no  opinion  in  regard  to  its  merits.  The 
Round  Table,  founded  in  1866,  and  managing  to 
exist  for  only  a  very  few  years,  was  typical  of  the 
recurring  effort  to  reproduce  the  London  literary  and 
political  weekly.  In  this  decade  of  1871-1880  I 
contributed  now  and  again  to  several  short-lived 
weeklies  of  lofty  ambition  and  of  inadequate  capital. 
One  of  these  was  the  Arcadian,  edited  for  a  little 
space  by  an  Englishman,  John  Eraser.  Another  was 
the  Library  Table,  edited  by  H.  L.  Hinton.  And 
toward  the  end  of  the  ten  years  I  did  not  a  little 
critical  writing  for  the  American,  published  weekly, 
not  in  New  York,  but  in  Philadelphia,  and  supported 
by  the  ample  means  of  Wharton  Barker. 

In  1875  I  made  my  first  contribution  to  the  Nation, 
then  a  weekly  of  lofty  ambition  and  of  high  achieve- 
ment. For  the  Nation  I  was  to  write  constantly  for 
twenty  years,  ceasing  in  1895;  and  I  was  even  a 
small  stockholder  for  a  little  while,  from  1877  to 
1881,  when  I  sold  out  at  a  slight  loss.  During  those 
two  decades  I  was  responsible  for  the  reviewing  of 
almost  every  book  which  dealt  in  any  way  with  the 
history  of  the  theater,  including  the  biographies 
and  autobiographies  of  actors.  There  were  certain 
other  topics  that  I  treated  as  books  appeared,  topics 
as  varied  as  book-bindings,  playing-cards,  fans,  and 


172  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

in  general  the  curiosities  of  literature  in  which  I 
still  retained  my  interest.  As  I  was  reading  a 
wide  selection  of  contemporary  French  books  I  was 
able  to  send  in  brief  notes  and  longer  reviews  upon 
volumes  not  likely  otherwise  to  receive  any  atten- 
tion. I  recall  that  my  first  article  was  on  the 
'Almanach  des  Spectacles/  while  my  second  was  a 
review  of  George  Henry  Lewes 's  most  suggestive 
essays  'On  Actors  and  the  Art  of  Acting.'  Altho 
I  more  than  once  ventured  into  the  field  of  politics, 
I  rarely  strayed  outside  of  the  narrow  domain  of  the 
drama,  and  the  broader  region  of  literature  at  large. 
When  I  began  to  write  for  it  the  Nation  was  ten 
years  old;  it  had  been  modelled  on  the  London 
Spectator;  and  it  had  at  last  succeeded  in  establish- 
ing itself  solidly.  It  paid  its  way;  and  it  distrib- 
uted meager  dividends  on  the  sixty  thousand  dollars' 
capital  which  had  been  raised  to  sustain  it  after  an 
earlier  enforced  reorganization  due  to  its  dilapi- 
dated financial  condition  after  its  cradle  struggles  — 
after  that  perilous  second  summer  which  is  as  likely 
to  be  fatal  to  a  journalistic  bantling  as  to  any  other 
infant.  Its  circulation  was  printed  in  every  issue; 
and  in  1875  this  exceeded  thirteen  thousand  copies. 
During  the  Hayes  and  Tilden  presidential  campaign 
of  the  next  year,  the  circulation  shrank  to  less  than 
hah*  of  what  it  had  been,  owing  to  the  inability  of 
its  editor  to  make  up  his  mind  which  of  the  two  can- 
didates he  ought  to  support;  and  this  decline  was 
bravely  recorded  week  by  week  until  the  figures  fell 
below  seven  thousand,  and  then  they  ceased  to  ap- 
pear. 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE   SEVENTIES     173 

The  editor  was  Edwin  Lawrence  Godkin,  who  re- 
tained sole  control  of  its  political  policy,  delegating 
the  management  of  its  book-reviewing  to  Wendell 
Phillips  Garrison;  and  it  was  with  Garrison,  there- 
fore, that  I  had  the  most  to  do,  altho  in  later  years 
I  came  to  know  Godkin  better.  Garrison  was  a 
son  of  William  Lloyd  Garrison;  he  had  been  a 
printer;  and  to  his  fine  taste  and  his  meticulous 
carefulness  was  due  the  typographical  integrity  of 
the  paper.  He  was  a  generous  editor,  winning  the 
affectionate  regard  of  his  contributors.  He  often 
rejected  articles  of  mine,  and  he  occasionally  made 
excisions  in  them;  but  he  never  suggested  any  modi- 
fication of  the  opinions  I  had  expressed.  He  had 
confidence  in  my  special  knowledge  of  the  topics 
which  I  treated;  and  he  let  me  say  my  say  in  my 
own  fashion  without  any  interference. 

Godkin  was  a  man  of  remarkable  character  and 
of  strong  personality;  and  I  do  not  think  that  the 
exact  nature  of  his  public  service  or  of  his  peculiar 
ability  has  been  properly  stated.  He  has  been  called 
a  political  thinker  of  marked  originality;  and  this 
to  my  mind  is  exactly  what  he  was  not.  He  was  a 
very  clever  Scotch-Irishman,  who  had  been  trained 
in  the  school  of  Mill  and  Macaulay,  and  who  was 
grounded  in  the  political  economy  of  the  Manchester 
school.  He  was  clear-headed,  but  he  was  never 
open-minded.  He  seemed  to  many  of  his  admirers 
to  be  an  original  thinker  because  he  was  able  to 
apply  to  American  conditions  the  principles  he  had 
absorbed  in  his  youth  in  England.  These,  as  it 
happened,  were  precisely  the  principles  which  needed 


174  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

to  be  applied  here  in  the  United  States  in  the  years 
that  followed  the  Civil  War.  Hard  money,  free 
trade,  home  rule,  the  merit  system,  all  needed  to 
be  expounded  to  the  American  people;  and  God- 
kin  expounded  them  with  unflagging  energy  and  un- 
failing felicity  of  illustration. 

He  was  a  born  journalist,  with  wit  at  his  command 
and  with  irony  in  abundance  —  altho  irony  is  never 
a  potent  weapon  of  persuasion.  When  at  last  the 
fight  was  won,  when  we  had  been  converted  to  hard 
money  and  free  trade,  to  home  rule  and  to  the  merit 
system,  and  when  other  problems  of  other  kinds 
needed  to  be  faced,  Godkin  found  himself  at  sea. 
His  political  writing  then  lost  much  of  its  force;  and 
in  the  later  years  of  his  life  he  had  ceased  to  be  a 
leader.  He  was  impervious  to  every  new  idea  in 
sociology  or  in  statecraft;  when  he  died  he  was 
limited  to  the  beliefs  he  had  held  when  he  immi- 
grated to  America.  His  faith  in  the  future  failed 
him;  he  sank  into  a  praiser  of  past  times  and  a  dis- 
parager of  the  present.  He  came  to  feel  that  a 
people  that  would  no  longer  listen  to  his  advice 
must  be  on  the  road  to  ruin;  and  his  main  regret 
was  —  as  he  once  expressed  it  to  an  associate  — 
that  he  would  not  live  to  see  the  fulfilment  of  his 
prophecies  of  evil. 

The  office  staff  of  the  Nation  was  small:  Godkin 
himself,  Garrison,  a  second  writer  on  politics  to  re- 
lieve Godkin,  and  also  a  writer  on  literary  themes. 
For  a  long  period  Arthur  G.  Sedgwick  was  Godkin's 
chief  assistant  as  a  political  contributor;  and  at 
one  time  or  another  the  literary  critic  in  the  office 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE  SEVENTIES     175 

was  Ho  wells  or  William  C.  Brownell.  Most  of  the 
reviewing  was  then  distributed  to  outside  experts 
of  high  distinction.  With  the  probable  excep- 
tion of  the  Saturday  Review  in  its  earliest  days,  I 
doubt  if  any  weekly  in  our  language  has  ever  had 
so  competent  a  body  of  reviewers.  J.  D.  Cox, 
J.  G.  Palfrey,  Francis  Walker,  James  Russell  Lowell, 
Thomas  R.  Lounsbury,  Charles  Eliot  Norton,  Henry 
James  were  all  frequent  contributors  of  criticisms 
upon  contemporary  books.  The  chief  London  cor- 
respondent was  James  Bryce;  and  the  Paris  corre- 
spondent was  Auguste  Laugel,  a  man  of  varied  in- 
terests, to  be  remembered  gratefully  by  all  Americans 
because  he  had  kept  the  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes  on 
the  side  of  the  Union  all  thru  the  dark  days  of  the 
Civil  War. 


Altho  my  contributions  to  the  Nation  were  not 
important,  I  was  proud  of  being  permitted  to  stand 
by  the  side  of  my  seniors,  and  to  be  enrolled  in  their 
goodly  company.  Yet  this  did  not  prohibit  me 
from  less  serious  associations;  and  when  Puck, 
which  had  been  founded  by  Keppler  and  Schwartz- 
mann  in  the  fall  of  1876  as  a  German  paper,  began 
to  appear  also  in  English,  under  the  editorship  of 
Sidney  Rosenfeld,  I  became  one  of  its  contributors. 
Rosenfeld's  foremost  assistant  was  H.  C.  Bunner, 
who  succeeded  him  as  editor  shortly  after  I  made 
his  acquaintance.  With  Bunner  I  formed  a  friend- 
ship which  endured  unclouded  until  his  untimely 


176  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

death  a  little  less  than  a  score  of  years  later.  What 
that  friendship  meant  to  me  I  tried  to  express  in  an 
article  written  immediately  after  he  died,  and  now 
included  in  my  volume  called  the  'Historical  Novel 
and  Other  Essays.'  But  it  is  grateful  again  to  re- 
cord the  closeness  of  the  ties  which  bound  us  to- 
gether. 

We  were  keenly  interested  in  the  same  things;  our 
tastes  were  acutely  sympathetic,  and  our  education 
and  experience  had  fitted  us  for  friendship.  He  was 
only  two  years  younger  than  I,  but  he  had  matured 
earlier.  At  our  first  meeting  we  felt  at  once  a  sense 
of  intimacy  that  ripened  as  we  came  to  know  each 
other  better.  We  lived  later  in  the  same  house; 
we  talked  over  our  hopes  and  ambitions;  we  read 
each  other's  manuscripts  and  we  revised  each  other's 
proof-sheets;  we  wrote  two  short-stories  in  partner- 
ship; he  dedicated  his  first  book  of  poems  to  me; 
and  I  inscribed  to  his  memory  the  first  volume  I 
published  after  his  death.  He  was  only  twenty- 
three  when  I  met  him,  and  he  was  already  master 
of  a  beautifully  limpid  prose  style,  and  already  a 
dexterous  versifier,  not  yet  aware  of  the  deeper 
notes  he  was  soon  to  strike  both  in  verse  and  in 
prose. 

In  a  paper  published  in  the  Atlantic  not  long  after 
the  demise  of  Punchinello,  its  editor,  Charles  Daw- 
son  Shanly,  declared  that  what  a  comic  paper  needed 
most  of  all  was  not  so  much  a  group  of  occasional 
contributors  of  scintillating  papers  as  two  or  three 
writers  who  could  be  relied  upon  week  in  and  week 
out  to  supply  their  stint  of  "comic  copy."  By  this 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE  SEVENTIES     177 

test  Banner  was  an  ideal  contributor,  for  he  could 
elaborate  the  scintillating  papers  and  he  could  also 
improvise  the  innumerable  paragraphs,  squibs,  quips, 
local  hits,  which  were  absolutely  essential  to  keep 
the  paper  going.  There  were  weeks  when  more 
than  half  of  the  matter  in  Puck  was  provided  by 
him  —  and  provided  easily,  without  any  sign  of 
strain.  He  combined  felicity  and  fecundity;  and 
he  never  relaxed  the  loyalty  of  his  service  to  Puck, 
even  when  he  had  won  a  larger  audience  by  his 
more  ambitious  prose  and  verse.  The  cartoons 
which  Keppler  designed  were  often  suggested  by 
Bunner,  just  as  Tenniel's  in  Punch  were  rarely  of 
his  own  invention,  but  indicated  to  him  by  the 
editorial  council  at  the  famous  Wednesday  dinners. 
While  Bunner  controlled  its  policy,  Puck  was  a 
comic  paper  which  was  more  than  a  comic  paper, 
because  its  editor  had  serious  views  upon  the  ques- 
tions of  the  day.  There  was  no  more  persuasive 
discussion  of  the  tariff  than  that  which  Bunner  pro- 
vided on  the  editorial  page  of  Puck  after  Cleveland 
had  declared  that  "a  condition  and  not  a  theory 
confronts  us."  No  political  writing  on  that  compli- 
cated problem  was  ever  simpler  than  Bunner's,  nor 
was  any  more  easily  understandable  by  the  casual 
and  careless  reader.  There  was  never  a  hint  of 
condescension  in  his  manner  of  explaining  the  prin- 
ciples he  was  advocating,  and  he  combined  candor 
and  clarity.  I  did  not  appreciate  the  full  merit  of 
these  editorials  of  his  until  he  once  summoned  me 
suddenly  to  write  a  page  of  them  for  him  when  he 
had  to  prepare  a  copy  of  verses  to  accompany  the 


178  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

pictorial  tribute  to  be  paid  to  Grant,  who  had  just 
been  vanquished  in  his  brave  fight  with  death.  I 
did  my  best  to  recapture  the  appealing  directness  of 
Bunner's  manner;  but  I  could  not  help  feeling  that 
I  had  not  succeeded  to  my  own  satisfaction. 

My  ordinary  contributions  to  Puck  amused  me  at 
least  as  much  as  they  could  have  amused  its  readers. 
It  was  fun  to  write  them;  and  for  perhaps  half-a- 
dozen  years  I  kept  on  turning  in  comic  copy  both 
in  prose  and  in  verse.  I  was  gratified  to  find  in 
the  autobiography  of  Mrs.  Strakosch  (Clara  Louise 
Kellogg)  that  she  recalled  an  anonymous  triolet  I 
had  rimed  about  "Kellogg  and  Gary  and  Roze,"  in 
1878,  and  still  more  gratified  to  discover  that  she 
attributed  it  to  Bunner.  In  the  summer  of  1878 
when  I  went  to  Europe  I  sent  back  a  [sequence  of 
letters  of  travel,  in  which  I  employed  most  of  the 
traditional  formulas  of  the  professional  manufac- 
turers of  comic  copy. 

As  I  look  back  over  those  early  years  of  Puck,  I 
can  recall  a  host  of  clever  articles  from  its  various 
contributors,  but  none  of  them  so  clever  as  Bunner 's 
own  series,  in  which  he  projected  the  grotesque  and 
yet  very  human  personality  of  the  professional  poet, 
V.  Hugo  Dusenbury.  Prose  and  verse  of  uncertain 
value,  but  always  touched  with  the  quaintness  of 
his  own  personality,  was  provided  incessantly  by 
R.  K.  Munkittrick,  whose  signature  was  often  sup- 
posed to  be  a  pen-name  derived  from  monkey -trick. 
His  comic  copy  was  often  mirth-provoking,  but  it 
lacked  a  little  of  the  flavor  of  his  talk.  "You  know 
that  house  of  mine  in  the  country  ?  "  he  said  to  Bun- 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE  SEVENTIES     179 

ner  one  day  in  an  exaggeration  of  his  habitually 
lugubrious  manner.  "Well,  now  I  want  to  sell  it, 
people  don't  even  go  by  in  the  road  —  and  when  I 
didn't  want  to  sell  it,  they  kept  coming  in  thru  the 
leaks  in  the  roof  with  certified  checks  in  their  hands  !" 
Munkittrick  had  shared  with  Bunner  and  me  in 
our  deep  admiration  for  the  delicate  art  of  Austin 
Dobson,  yet  his  allegiance  weakened  a  little  when 
he  came  later  under  the  spell  of  Stevenson's  '  Child's 
Garden.'  As  was  customary  with  him,  he  expressed 
in  verse  his  change  of  heart.  I  doubt  whether  he 
ever  published  this  brief  metrical  criticism,  and  as 
it  tenaciously  clung  to  my  memory  I  make  bold  to 
preserve  here  his  invocation  to  the  poet  whose  ban- 
ner he  was  deserting: 

Austin,  Austin,  Austin, 

Dobby,  Dobby,  Dobby, 
Altho  writing  verses 

Seems  to  be  your  hobby, 
Stevenson  can  take  you, 

With  Messrs.  Gosse  and  Lang 
And  knock  your  heads  together 

With  a  bang,  bang,  bang ! 

It  was  with  Bunner  that  I  went  one  Sunday  after- 
noon in  1878  to  a  meeting  of  the  Rectilinear,  as  a 
group  of  four  poets  entitled  themselves,  when  they 
gathered  together  to  listen  to  each  other's  verse. 
These  four  youthful  lyrists  were  my  schoolfellow, 
Francis  S.  Saltus;  a  gifted  and  erratic  Irishman, 
John  Moran,  who  was  once  moved  to  rime  a  real 
poem,  his  'Ballade  of  Battle,  Murder  and  Sudden 


180  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Death';  George  Edgar  Montgommery,  who  be- 
came a  little  later,  and  for  a  brief  period  only,  the 
dramatic  critic  of  the  New  York  Times;  and  Edgar 
Fawcett,  who  was  the  oldest,  the  best  known,  and 
by  far  the  ablest  of  the  quartet.  The  four  of  them 
used  to  come  together  every  Sunday  afternoon;  and 
now  and  again  they  invited  other  youthful  bards  to 
take  part  in  their  shop-talk.  They  all  had  a  pas- 
sion for  poetry,  altho  their  aspiration  was  more 
obvious  than  their  inspiration;  and  they  all  took 
themselves  very  seriously,  especially  Fawcett. 

Fawcett  has  to  his  credit  several  volumes  of  verse, 
two  or  three  plays,  and  a  dozen  or  a  score  of  novels; 
but  he  was  far  more  fecund  than  his  few  ardent 
admirers  knew,  since  he  supported  himself  by  con- 
cocting sensational  serials  for  one  of  the  cheapest 
weekly  story-papers.  He  was  the  most  sensitive 
of  poets,  with  a  skin  so  thin  that  a  falling  rose-leaf 
would  abrade  it.  He  had  emitted  a  shrill  shriek 
when  the  meter  of  one  of  his  earliest  lyrics  had  been 
modified  for  the  better  by  the  editor  who  accepted 
it  for  the  columns  of  the  Evening  Post,  an  insignificant 
correction  due  to  the  more  delicate  ear  of  William 
Cullen  Bryant.  Perhaps  the  most  forcible  character- 
ization of  Fawcett's  unfortunate  peculiarities  was 
made  in  my  presence  by  Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich, 
who  knew  him  even  better  than  I  did,  and  who 
esteemed  his  poetry  more  highly.  ''Yes,  Fawcett 
is  very  touchy;  in  fact  he  is  so  sensitive  that  he 
reminds  me  of  a  human  eyeball  on  a  gravel  walk, 
where  to  remain  still  is  impossible,  and  yet  every 
movement  is  exquisite  agony !" 


NEW  YORK  IN  THE  SEVENTIES     181 

I  attended  only  one  meeting  of  the  Rectilinear. 
I  do  not  know  how  the  peace  was  kept  between 
Fawcett  and  his  brother  bards.  But  it  must  have 
been  enforced  somehow,  for  they  sometimes  agreed 
so  completely  as  to  undertake  the  composition  of  a 
sonnet  in  collaboration.  Whether  they  accomplished 
this  metrical  feat  more  than  once  I  cannot  say. 
That  they  did  accomplish  it  once  at  least  is  posi- 
tively proved  by  a  sheet  of  paper  in  my  possession, 
whereon  (in  the  handwriting  of  Saltus)  there  are 
fourteen  lines  on  *  Greece,'  due  to  the  conjoint 
muses  of  the  quartet,  the  place  of  the  missing 
Montgommery  being  taken  for  once  by  Bunner.  It 
was  to  Bunner  that  I  owed  the  manuscript;  and  he 
explained  that  the  four  participants  had  agreed  on 
a  topic;  they  had  selected  the  fourteen  riming  words; 
they  had  distributed  the  quatrains  and  the  tercets, 
one  to  each  of  the  four  —  and  then  they  had  sever- 
ally and  simultaneously  been  delivered  of  their  re- 
spective shares: 

GREECE 

Land  of  the  Gods  that  gave  us  wine  and  love, 
Those  greatest  gifts  that  Fate  has  given  to  men, 
Thy  shrines  in  secret  honored  now,  were  then 

Circled  by  maidens,  wreathed  with  flowers  above ! 

[JOHN  MORAN.] 

Oh  land  that  memory  will  not  weary  of, 
Deathless  though  poesy's  consecrating  pen ! 
Land  in  whose  fadeless  groves  we  hear  again, 

Melodious  moans  from  Aphrodite's  dove ! 

[EDGAR  FAWCETT.] 


182  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Land  where  white  Parthenon's  tower  in  the  blue 
Of  perfect  skies !  and  where  in  woodland  green, 
Ghosts  of  Diana  flutter  everywhere ! 

[FRANCIS  S.  SALTUS.] 

Ever  thy  light  these  cold  late  days  gleams  through, 
We  stretch  our  hands  to  thee,  in  faint  dreams  seen, 
Thou  to  all  men,  throughout  all  ages,  fair ! 

[H.    C.    BUNNER.] 


CHAPTER  IX 
PARISIAN  MEMORIES 


IN  recording  my  trip  to  Europe  in  the  summer  of 
1873  I  omitted  to  set  down  one  incident.  I 
had  already  decided  that  I  wanted  to  be  a 
dramatist,  and  it  had  occurred  to  me  that  the  best 
way  to  ascertain  the  practices  of  the  play-maker 
would  be  to  enter  the  studio  of  an  experienced  art- 
ist —  in  other  words,  to  persuade  some  older  play- 
wright to  collaborate  with  me.  After  more  than 
forty  years  of  observation  and  reflection  upon  the 
art  of  dramaturgy  I  am  now  even  more  strongly 
convinced  of  the  inestimable  advantage  it  is  for  a 
novice  to  sit  at  the  feet  of  an  older  practitioner  and 
thus  to  be  initiated  into  the  secrets  of  the  craft. 
Every  art  has  to  be  acquired;  and  whatever  has  to 
be  learned  can  be  taught,  but  it  can  be  taught  to 
advantage  only  by  those  who  have  themselves  prac- 
tised it.  The  apprentice  painters  enroll  themselves 
in  the  class  of  an  older  artist;  and  it  would  never 
occur  to  any  of  them  to  seek  the  instruction  of  a 
mere  critic.  No  teaching  can  be  as  intimate  and  as 
practical  as  that  which  is  given  unconsciously  in  the 
course  of  collaboration;  and  this  truth  I  verified 
later  when  I  had  the  signal  privilege  of  composing 
a  play  in  partnership  with  Bronson  Howard. 

183 


184  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

In  1873  the  most  popular  of  Parisian  playwrights 
was  Dennery,  the  concocter  of  countless  melodramas, 
of  which  perhaps  the  most  ingeniously  contrived 
and  the  most  widely  successful  was  'Don  Cesar  de 
Bazan.'  And  it  was  to  him  that  I  boldly  resolved 
to  address  myself.  I  had  a  lot  of  loose  hints  for  a 
Western  play,  to  be  set  off  with  red  Indians  and  red 
blood  and  red  fire;  they  were  the  result  not  of  my 
own  brief  acquaintance  with  the  Chippeways,  but 
rather  were  they  the  residuum  of  my  reading  in 
Edward  S.  Ellis's  contributions  to  Beadle's  Dime 
Novels.  I  set  these  stray  suggestions  in  such  order 
as  I  could,  and  I  sought  out  Dennery.  I  was  told 
that  he  occupied  one  of  the  apartments  in  a  sumptu- 
ous edifice  which  he  had  erected  near  the  Arc  de 
Triomphe,  and  there  one  sunny  morning  in  June  I 
betook  myself  with  my  notes  in  my  pocket,  and  with 
hope  in  my  heart  struggling  against  diffidence. 

At  the  broad  door  of  the  immense  house  which 
testified  to  the  profitableness  of  play-making  in 
France,  I  asked  the  porter  if  M.  Dennery  was  at 
home. 

"Monsieur  has  only  this  moment  gone  out,"  re- 
sponded the  porter.  "He  cannot  be  very  far." 
And  after  kindly  looking  toward  the  Champs-Elysees 
he  added:  "There  he  is  now  —  just  at  the  corner 
—  that  old  gentleman  with  the  white  umbrella." 

I  thanked  the  porter  and  sped  in  pursuit  of  the 
playwright.  The  steps  of  youth  were  swifter  than 
the  pace  of  age,  and  I  soon  came  abreast  of  Dennery, 
who  paused  courteously  at  my  unexpected  self- 
introduction.  He  was  a  handsome  old  gentleman, 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  185 

with  fine  white  hair  and  very  clever  eyes.  He  car- 
ried himself  erect,  and  he  wore  in  his  buttonhole  the 
red  ribbon  of  the  Legion  of  Honor  which  in  France 
certifies  to  success. 

However  surprised  he  may  have  been  at  my  un- 
warranted obtrusion,  he  listened  to  me  with  the  ut- 
most courtesy,  the  white  umbrella  shading  the  pair 
of  us  from  the  summer  sunshine.  I  explained  to 
him  that  I  was  a  young  American,  most  anxious  for 
his  counsel  and  co-operation  in  the  composition  of 
a  piece  upon  an  American  subject.  He  requested 
me  to  outline  the  novel  points  of  my  proposed  play. 
I  did  so  as  best  I  could,  discovering  in  so  doing  that 
they  seemed  suddenly  to  lack  not  only  novelty  but 
value. 

He  heard  me  thru,  tolerantly  overlooking  the 
blunders  of  my  schoolboy  French.  Then,  when  I 
had  made  an  end,  he  told  me  that  my  suggestions 
were  interesting,  very  interesting.  Yet  the  piece  I 
was  proposing  belonged  to  a  type  which  no  longer 
tempted  him,  since  he  was  devoting  himself  then  to 
domestic  dramas.  "  Maintenant,  je  fais  plutot  des 
drames  intimes."  And  before  we  parted  he  advised 
me  to  apply  to  a  frequent  collaborator  of  his,  Ferdi- 
nand Dugue. 

Bacon  tells  us  never  to  give  a  reason  for  a  nega- 
tive; and  the  reason  Dennery  had  given  me  for  his 
negative  was  not  of  the  best,  since  the  two  plays  he 
was  next  to  produce  were  the  'Two  Orphans,'  and 
'Around  the  World  in  Eighty  Days,'  neither  of 
which  can  be  properly  classified  as  a  drame  intime. 

I  did  not  go  to  Ferdinand  Dugue,  who  had  orig- 


186  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

inally  been  my  third  choice.  I  went  to  my  second 
choice,  Eugene  Nus,  one  of  the  authors  of  the  French 
originals  of  the  once  popular  pieces  known  in  English 
as  the  'Ticket-of -Leave  Man'  and  the  'Streets  of 
New  York.'  In  spite  of  the  popularity  of  these 
plays,  Nus  was  living  in  a  tiny  little  apartment  on  the 
top  floor  of  an  old  house  in  a  side  street.  He  also 
was  a  white-haired  wearer  of  the  Legion  of  Honor; 
and  his  reception  of  me  was  even  more  courteous 
than  Dennery's.  I  had  half-a-dozen  long  talks  with 
him,  and  he  convinced  me  that  there  was  nothing 
in  my  project  for  a  Wild  West  piece.  But  he  won- 
dered if  there  were  not  other  aspects  of  American 
life  which  could  be  made  interesting  to  French  play- 
goers; there  was,  for  example,  la  loi  de  Lynch. 

I  knew  as  little  about  Lynch  law  as  Nus  could 
know,  but  I  was  eager  to  write  a  play  about  any- 
thing, and  I  had  the  unfailing  confidence  of  youth. 
So  it  was  that  in  the  course  of  our  several  inter- 
views my  invention  was  stimulated,  and  I  sketched 
out  a  situation  which  I  still  believe  to  be  relatively 
new,  and  probably  effective.  This  pleased  Nus,  and 
we  started  in  to  put  together  the  skeleton  of  a  plot 
with  this  situation  as  its  backbone.  Before  we  had 
done  more  than  to  glimpse  its  theatrical  possibilities 
I  had  to  leave  Paris  to  take  up  my  duties  in  my 
father's  office.  While  collaboration  is  beneficial,  it 
cannot  be  conducted  profitably  by  correspondence; 
and  altho  Nus  and  I  may  have  interchanged  a  letter 
or  two,  the  skeleton  of  our  proposed  play  did  not 
take  on  any  flesh. 

In  the  spring  of  1878,  after  an  absence  of  five 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  187 

years,  I  arrived  in  Paris  again;  and  even  before 
going  to  the  Exposition  I  looked  up  Nus.  I  found 
that  he  had  moved  to  another  tiny  apartment  at 
the  top  of  another  old  house  in  another  side  street. 
I  found  also  when  I  presented  myself  that  he  did 
not  at  first  recognize  me,  altho  his  memory  returned 
when  I  put  together  again  the  skeleton  of  the  plot 
we  had  begun  to  build.  Naturally  I  laid  most 
stress  on  the  novel  and  effective  situation  I  had  in- 
vented. 

"Ah,"  said  Nus  a  little  doubtfully,  "so  it  was  you 
who  suggested  that  scene?" 

With  prompt  paternal  pride  I  claimed  it  for  my 
own. 

"Ah,"  said  Nus  again,  "I  had  forgotten  that  — 
and  I  have  since  utilized  that  scene  in  a  play  that  I 
have  been  writing  with  another  collaborator." 

There  seemed  to  me  to  be  no  need  to  continue 
the  conversation  further,  and  I  withdrew.  I  fol- 
lowed the  Parisian  stage  very  carefully  in  those  days, 
and  I  failed  to  find  in  the  ensuing  years  any  account 
of  any  play  by  Nus  in  which  my  situation  appeared. 
In  fact,  I  failed  to  find  an  account  of  any  new 
piece  by  Nus,  who  was  then  not  only  an  old  man, 
but  emphatically  old-fashioned  in  his  methods.  His 
fame  had  faded  long  before  his  death,  which  took 
place  two  or  three  years  later. 

Yet,  as  Nus  had  seen  fit  to  use  my  situation  in  a 
play  written  with  another  than  its  inventor,  I  felt 
perfectly  free  to  utilize  it  myself.  And  I  may  here 
anticipate  so  far  as  to  record  that  a  decade  or  so 
later  I  joined  forces  with  my  friend,  George  H. 


188  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Jessop,  in  drafting  a  piece  with  this  situation  as  its 
center.  Oddly  enough,  our  play  never  saw  the  light 
of  the  lamps;  and  Jessop  turned  it  into  a  serial 
story,  afterward  published  as  a  book  under  the  title 
of  'Judge  Lynch.' 


II 

As  I  have  not  recorded  my  experiences  with  Den- 
nery  and  Nus  in  their  proper  chronological  place  in 
1873,  so  I  also  failed  to  record  in  its  proper  place  in 
1867  my  first  interview  with  Coquelin.  I  had  seen 
him  several  times  at  the  Theatre  Franc, ais,  and  I  was 
greatly  taken  by  his  engaging  personality.  I  was 
then  only  fifteen,  and  I  was  acutely  conscious  of  the 
deficiencies  of  my  French.  It  occurred  to  me  that 
I  might  get  Coquelin  to  give  me  lessons.  My  father 
highly  approved  of  this,  so  I  looked  up  the  address 
of  the  accomplished  comedian,  and  rang  the  door- 
bell of  his  modest  apartment.  As  it  happened,  he 
opened  the  door  himself.  I  proffered  my  request 
and  he  declined  it  courteously.  I  was  only  an  awk- 
ward boy,  stammering  a  tongue  which  was  not  my 
own,  and  I  had  no  right  to  suppose  that  Coquelin 
would  care  to  teach  me  in  the  proper  use  of  his  deli- 
cately varied  language. 

When  my  sisters  went  to  Paris  in  1877  I  wrote 
over  urging  them  to  apply  to  Coquelin  for  instruc- 
tion in  delivery,  in  diction,  as  the  French  call  it. 
Their  French  was  far  better  in  1877  than  mine  had 
been  in  1867;  and  the  actor  was  persuaded  to  under- 
take their  tuition,  and  to  impart  to  them  the  tradi- 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  189 

tions  of  French  speech  as  these  have  been  preserved 
by  the  Comedie-Frangaise. 

In  that  winter  of  1877-1878  the  company  of  the 
House  of  Moliere  acquitted  itself  of  a  filial  duty  by 
publishing  in  a  limited  edition  its  most  precious  pos- 
session, the  famous  Register  of  La  Grange,  the  day- 
book wherein  the  actor  who  was  Moliere's  right-hand 
man  in  the  management  of  the  company  from  which 
the  Comedie-Frangaise  is  proud  to  claim  its  direct 
descent,  had  recorded  the  plays  presented  night  after 
night,  and  had  set  down  also  the  takings  at  the  door. 
My  sisters  sent  me  this  as  a  Christmas  present, 
and  they  got  Coquelin  to  enrich  it  with  the  signa- 
tures of  his  comrades,  Maubant,  Delaunay,  and 
Febvre.  On  the  same  fly-leaf  Coquelin  had  made  a 
declaration  of  his  own  artistic  faith.  He  transcribed 
a  line  from  the  'Precieuses  Ridicules,'  in  which  he 
was  the  triumphant  impersonator  of  the  voluble  and 
conceited  Mascarille:  "All  that  I  do,  I  do  without 
effort."  And  to  this  quotation  he  had  appended: 
"That  is  not  like  me.  C.  Coquelin." 

Introduced  by  my  sisters,  Coquelin  and  I  struck 
up  an  immediate  friendship  which  steadily  strength- 
ened with  the  revolving  years,  and  which  terminated 
only  with  his  untimely  death  in  1909,  when  he  was 
in  the  plenitude  of  his  powers,  and  when  he  was 
about  to  undertake  the  'Chantecler'  of  Rostand, 
written  to  display  his  infinite  variety  and  very  prob- 
ably even  suggested  by  his  habit  of  signing  himself 
"Coq."  In  1878,  when  I  made  his  acquaintance,  his 
reputation  was  still  broadening.  At  the  Theatre 
Frangais  he  shared  the  chief  comic  characters  with 


190  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Got,  a  masterly  comedian,  whose  power  was,  perhaps, 
more  intense  than  Coquelin's,  altho  his  range  was 
far  more  restricted.  The  Comedie-Frangaise  is  a 
commonwealth,  to  use  the  term  best  known  on  the 
American  stage;  that  is  to  say,  the  leading  actors 
are  partners  in  the  enterprise,  sharing  in  the  profits 
and  paying  wages  to  the  performers  of  the  less  im- 
portant parts.  This  was  the  system  at  the  Globe 
Theater  in  London,  under  Elizabeth  and  James, 
when  Shakspere  was  one  of  the  sharers;  and  it  was 
the  system  at  the  Palais  Royal  in  Paris  when  Mo- 
liere  was  the  chief  of  the  company  from  which 
the  Comedie-Frangaise  is  lineally  derived. 

Altho  there  is  also  a  manager  of  the  Theatre 
Frangais,  appointed  by  the  government  and  thereby 
becoming  one  of  the  sharers,  the  associated  actors 
and  actresses,  the  sodetaires,  more  or  less  manage 
their  own  affairs  in  town-meeting.  Their  engage- 
ments are  for  life  or  until  retirement  after  a  benefit 
and  on  a  pension;  and  as  they  thus  feel  themselves 
at  home  in  their  own  theater  they  have  made  them- 
selves comfortable.  Their  greenroom,  the  foyer  des 
artistes,  is  a  stately  hall,  richly  furnished  and  hung 
with  the  most  important  of  the  many  portraits 
and  groups  of  the  actors  and  actresses  of  the 
past  from  Moliere's  day  to  the  last  years  of  the 
nineteenth  century.  This  greenroom  is  nightly  fre- 
quented not  only  by  the  actors  themselves  and  by 
the  leading  authors  of  the  varied  repertory  of  the 
Theatre  Frangais,  but  also  by  the  leading  lovers  of 
the  histrionic  art.  And  every  one  of  the  associates 
has  his  or  her  individual  dressing-room,  not  a  mere 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  191 

cubby-hole  like  those  assigned  to  transient  strollers 
in  our  American  theaters,  but  a  fairly  spacious  room 
to  be  arranged  and  furnished  and  decorated  in  ac- 
cord with  the  taste  of  its  occupant. 

Coquelin's  dressing-room  had  two  windows  on 
the  street;  it  was  perhaps  sixteen  or  eighteen  feet 
square;  and  small  as  it  was,  it  had  been  ingeniously 
divided  into  three,  a  narrow  entrance  hall  leading 
into  a  parlor  in  front  on  the  street,  thus  leaving  a 
small  corner  alcove  in  which  the  comedian  could 
change  his  costume  and  his  make-up,  secluded  by 
curtains  from  the  parlor  wherein  he  might  be  enter- 
taining his  friends,  who  could  continue  to  converse 
with  him  while  he  was  preparing  for  his  stage  work. 
Now  and  again,  in  1878  and  afterward  in  later  sum- 
mers when  I  spent  a  few  weeks  in  Paris,  I  would 
make  my  way  up  many  stairs  and  along  intricate 
corridors  to  knock  at  Coquelin's  door.  It  was  a 
pleasure  merely  to  be  in  the  little  parlor,  which  so 
completely  reflected  the  many-sided  personality  of 
the  actor. 

When  I  became  acquainted  with  this  reception- 
room  its  chief  adornment  was  a  series  of  portraits 
of  Coquelin  in  his  most  important  parts,  painted  by 
one  or  another  of  the  artists  who  were  his  intimate 
friends.  These  portraits  were  all  of  the  same  size, 
panels  perhaps  fifteen  inches  in  height,  or  a  little 
taller;  and  when  I  first  saw  them  they  were  only  a 
dozen  or  so.  In  the  course  of  years  the  collection 
kept  on  growing  until  at  last  it  numbered  more  than 
a  score.  After  Coquelin's  death  these  panel-portraits 
were  reproduced  in  colored  photogravures,  issued  in 


192  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

a  portfolio  and  in  a  very  limited  edition,  so  that 
his  friends  and  admirers  might  possess  pictorial 
memorials  of  his  many  histrionic  achievements. 
The  interest  of  these  portraits  in  character  can  be 
gauged  by  the  fact  that  half-a-dozen  were  painted 
by  Friant,  two  each  by  Detaille  and  by  Madrazo, 
and  others  by  Boldini,  Dagnan-Bouveret,  Duez, 
Louis  Leloir  and  Jean  Beraud. 

Coquelin  was  an  assiduous  collector  of  pictures, 
appreciating  with  equal  insight  their  artistic  merit 
and  their  pecuniary  value.  In  later  years,  when  he 
was  playing  a  summer  engagement  in  London,  he 
showed  me  a  little  Constable  he  had  just  purchased; 
and  after  dwelling  on  the  characteristic  beauty  of 
the  landscape,  he  added  that  he  believed  that  Con- 
stables would  still  rise  in  price:  "  Je  crois  qu'il  y  a 
encore  quelque  chose  a  faire  avec  les  Constables"  He 
had  a  lovely  example  of  Millet;  and  on  one  of  his 
visits  to  New  York  he  purchased  a  Japanese  land- 
scape by  John  La  Farge,  pointing  out  to  me  that 
he  had  bought  it  on  its  sheer  quality,  and  regardless 
of  any  difficulty  he  might  have  of  disposing  of  it 
in  Paris,  where  there  was  no  assured  market  for 
American  paintings. 

With  the  young  poets  he  was  as  friendly  as  with 
the  young  painters;  and  to  the  poets  he  was  even 
more  helpful,  making  them  known  by  his  recitation 
of  their  verses.  Referring  one  day  to  the  aid  that 
Regnier  had  rendered  to  Jules  Sandeau  in  the  drama- 
tization of  'Mile,  de  la  Seigliere,'  he  told  me  that  he 
had  been  of  similar  assistance  to  Theodore  de  Ban- 
ville  in  the  improvement  of  the  plot  of  'Gringoire,' 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  193 

in  which  he  was  the  original  and  unequalled  imper- 
sonator of  the  brave  writer  of  dangerous  ballads. 
When  Banville  read  him  the  play,  it  had  no  more 
theatrical  effectiveness  than  may  be  found  in  the 
poet's  other  pieces,  in  which  dexterity  of  plotting 
is  not  conspicuous.  Coquelin  suggested  several  in- 
genious complications  of  the  story  likely  to  heighten 
its  attractiveness  on  the  stage.  Banville  turned  on 
him  with  the  truculent  query:  "Then  you  want  me 
to  write  a  play  like  Monsieur  Scribe's?" 

Now,  Scribe  was  the  abomination  of  desolation  to 
all  the  followers  of  Theophile  Gautier,  of  whom 
Banville  was  the  chief. 

"Yes,"  returned  Coquelin  firmly;  "that  is  exactly 
what  I  do  want  you  to  do." 

"Very  well,  then,"  Banville  responded;  "that  is 
what  I  will  do.  I  will  rewrite  this  play  to  be  like 
one  of  Scribe's  ! " 

Probably  it  is  due  to  these  suggestions  of  the  ex- 
perienced actor  that  'Gringoire'  has  had  a  life  in 
the  theater,  not  only  in  France  but  in  Great  Britain 
and  the  United  States,  far  longer  and  far  more  re- 
munerative than  fell  to  the  lot  of  any  other  of  its 
author's  attempts  at  play-making. 

Ill 

Friendly  as  were  Coquelin 's  relations  with  poets 
and  with  painters,  his  most  intimate  friend  was  the 
politician  who  had  proclaimed  the  republic.  Every 
afternoon  Gambetta  and  Coquelin  could  be  seen 
alone  together  in  an  open  carriage  in  the  Bois  de 


194  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Boulogne.  Nor  did  the  actor  lose  his  intense  in- 
terest in  public  affairs  after  the  sudden  and  un- 
timely death  of  Gambetta.  He  became  in  time  al- 
most equally  intimate  with  Waldeck-Rousseau,  the 
chief  of  the  cabinet  which  was  courageous  enough 
to  undo  the  hideous  wrong  done  to  Dreyfus.  Like 
the  large  majority  of  the  so-called  "Intellectuals," 
Coquelin  was  an  ardent  advocate  of  justice  in  that 
unfortunate  affair,  which  almost  threatened  to  drive 
France  to  the  brink  of  civil  war. 

Interested  as  he  was  in  politics,  in  poetry,  in  paint- 
ing and  in  the  fine  arts  generally,  Coquelin  never 
allowed  any  of  these  avocations  to  interfere  with  his 
vocation  —  acting.  His  integrity  as  an  artist  was 
beyond  reproach.  He  brought  to  the  art  of  acting 
extraordinary  gi'fts,  an  alert  personality,  a  keen  in- 
telligence, a  supple  body,  a  most  mobile  face,  and  a 
clarion  voice  of  marvellous  richness  and  resonance. 
But  he  never  relied  on  the  advantages  bestowed  by 
nature;  he  was  an  indefatigable  worker,  as  untir- 
ing physically  as  he  was  mentally.  He  had  a  wider 
versatility  than  any  of  the  other  famous  actors  of 
our  time  and  of  various  tongues  which  it  has  been 
my  good  fortune  to  see  on  the  stage;  and  he  had  a 
more  far-reaching  ambition.  Primarily,  and  by  gift 
of  God  and  by  grace  of  good  teaching,  he  was  a 
comedian,  the  incomparable  representative  of  the  se- 
ries of  superb  characters  which  Moliere  had  created 
two  centuries  earlier  for  his  own  acting.  Noth- 
ing more  superbly  artistic  could  be  imagined  than 
his  Mascarille  in  the  'Precieuses  Ridicules.' 

He  was  equally  triumphant  and  equally  artistic 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  195 

in  old  comedies  and  in  new  comedies,  in  character 
parts,  firmly  grasped  and  delicately  discriminated 
(like  the  lawyer  in  'Mile,  de  la  Seigliere,'  the  old 
servant  in  'La  Joie  Fait  Peur,'  and  the  braggart  sot 
in  the  'Aventuriere'),  in  the  exuberant  and  ex- 
aggerated highly  colored  profile  figures  of  farce  (like 
the  much-married  hero  of  the  'Surprises  du  Divorce' 
and  in  the  ungrateful  boaster  of  the  c  Voyage  de  M. 
Perrichon').  But  these  comic  parts,  in  which  he 
was  simply  incomparable,  reveal  only  a  few  of  the 
many  manifestations  of  his  histrionic  merits.  Other 
aspects  were  displayed  in  the  pathetic  figures  of  the 
erring  poet  in  'Gringoire'  and  of  the  self-sacrificing 
cripple  in  the  'Luthier  de  Cremone';  in  the  fast 
young  fellow  in  the  'Fourchambault,'  and  in  the 
decadent  duke  in  the  'Etrangere';  in  the  lustful  and 
treacherous  Scarpia  in  'La  Tosca,'  in  the  devil- 
may-care  'Don  Cesar  de  Bazan,'  and  in  the  austere 
and  severe  directness  of  old  Duval  in  the  'Dame  aux 
Camelias.'  He  could  be  all  things  in  all  plays, 
with  an  infinite  variety  that  never  staled;  and  it 
was  only  in  'Cyrano  de  Bergerac/  tailor-made  to 
his  manifold  talents,  that  he  was  able  to  reveal  his 
many-sidedness  in  a  single  play,  wherein  he  was  by 
turn  comic  and  pathetic,  grotesque  and  lyric,  arti- 
ficial and  sincere,  burlesque  and  heroic. 

To  insist  that  he  was  incomparably  the  most  ver- 
satile actor  it  has  ever  been  my  good  fortune  to 
study  in  a  heterogeny  of  parts  is  not  to  suggest  that 
he  was  able  to  divest  himself  of  his  own  personality 
or  to  disguise  from  the  spectators  that  he  was  the 
same  Coquelin  they  had  seen  impersonate  a  host 


196  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

of  other  characters.  He  knew  better  than  to  at- 
tempt this,  and  he  understood  his  art  too  well  to 
believe  that  it  was  desirable,  even  if  attainable. 
No  more  than  any  other  artist  can  the  actor  step 
off  his  own  shadow;  and  no  more  than  any  other 
artist  should  he  seek  to  do  so.  He  must  be  able  to 
assume  characters  not  his  own,  and,  as  the  phrase 
is,  to  "get  into  their  skins"  as  completely  as  he  can; 
but  he  still  has  to  wear  his  own  skin  underneath 
these  superimposed  cuticles.  It  is  the  actor's  own 
individuality  which  delights  us,  even  when  it  is  for 
the  moment  expressing  itself  as  the  individuality  of 
another  being.  The  performers  who  succeed  in  so 
completely  concealing  themselves  that  we  do  not 
recognize  them  in  successive  parts  —  if  there  are 
any  such  —  have  never  held  high  rank  on  the  stage; 
and  any  one  of  them  could  have  accomplished  the 
needless  feat  only  because  he  was  devoid  of  a  com- 
pelling personality  of  his  own. 

Coquelin  had  the  faculty  of  expressing  himself 
most  abundantly  at  the  very  moment  when  he  was 
most  completely  impersonating  a  character  abso- 
lutely not  himself.  In  the  course  of  the  forty  years 
and  more  that  I  had  studied  his  art  I  saw  him 
undertake  characters  of  almost  every  type;  and  never 
did  I  have  occasion  to  feel  that  the  part  might  have 
been  better  played  by  another  actor  —  except  pos- 
sibly once,  when  he  was  cast  for  Chamillac,  the  title 
part  in  a  thin  and  false  play  of  Octave  Feuillet's. 
Chamillac  was  a  straight  leading  man,  a  misunder- 
stood hero,  without  wit  or  humor,  without  the  solid- 
ity of  reality,  and  Coquelin  played  it  admirably. 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  197 

Yet  while  there  was  no  fault  to  be  found  with  his 
reserve  and  with  his  dignity,  I  wondered  whether 
an  inferior  performer,  of  a  less  constraining  artistic 
conscience,  might  not  have  falsely  made  it  more 
effective.  And  I  did  not  have  an  opportunity  to 
see  him  in  the  'Juif  Polonais,'  known  in  English  as 
the  *  Bells.'  He  told  me  once  that  he  thought 
Irving's  performance  was  not  in  accord  with  the 
intent  of  the  authors,  Erckmann-Chatrian,  who  had 
drawn  a  far  simpler  and  less  tragic  figure  than  that 
presented  by  the  British  actor.  When  I  mentioned 
this  to  William  Archer,  who  had  seen  both  Coquelin 
and  Irving  in  the  part,  he  remarked  that  he  thought 
Coquelin  probably  in  the  right  in  his  belief,  adding 
that  in  this  case  the  play  was  a  poor  and  empty 
thing,  becoming  valuable  only  when  Irving  tran- 
scended its  authors'  intent  and  lifted  the  character 
up  into  a  loftier  realm  of  realistic  fantasy. 

I  did  have  the  delight  of  seeing  Coquelin  as  Tar- 
tuffe,  another  of  the  parts  in  which  his  performance 
was  disputed  —  a  part  in  which  he  appeared  in  New 
York,  altho  never  in  Paris,  to  the  best  of  my  belief. 
Tartuffe  is  the  only  one  of  Moliere's  chief  characters 
which  he  did  not  devise  for  his  own  acting,  compos- 
ing the  richly  comic  Orgon  for  himself,  and  casting 
the  hypocrite  to  Du  Croisy,  also  a  comedian.  And 
altho  Coquelin  could  play  the  villain  to  perfection, 
as  his  Scarpia  proved,  he  chose  to  preserve  what  he 
held  to  be  Moliere's  purpose,  and  he  represented 
Tartuffe  as  a  character  fundamentally  comic  in  his 
egotism,  his  greed,  his  sensuality.  It  was  a  wholly 
satisfactory  impersonation,  truer  to  the  spirit  of 


198  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Moliere's  masterpiece  than  any  other  I  have  ever 
seen.  It  rose  to  the  sinister  and  almost  to  the 
terrible,  at  the  culminating  moment,  the  marvel- 
lously unexpected  turn  of  the  traitor  at  the  climax 
of  the  fourth  act. 

In  his  youth  Coquelin  had  a  good  singing  voice; 
and  he  informed  me  that  Auber  wanted  him  to 
cultivate  it  for  light  opera.  But  he  had  entered 
the  conservatory  in  the  class  of  Regnier,  who  early 
divined  his  possibilities  and  who  was  so  afraid  that 
Coquelin' s  natural  endowments  and  unusual  pre- 
cocity would  tempt  him  to  neglect  the  hard  work 
essential  for  mastery  of  any  art,  that  the  teacher 
pretended  to  discourage  his  pupil's  comic  bent,  and 
forced  him  to  study  the  more  restrained  and  less 
exuberant  character  parts  —  a  training  for  which 
Coquelin  was  afterward  profoundly  grateful.  My 
memory  of  Regnier  is  but  dim,  yet  I  feel  sure  that 
I  am  right  in  thinking  that  few  comedians  were  ever 
more  unlike  than  he  and  Coquelin.  From  Regnier, 
however,  Coquelin  learned  how  to  compose  a  char- 
acter; and  he  also  studied  to  advantage  Samson, 
whose  method  Regnier  did  not  greatly  relish.  Coque- 
lin, so  he  explained  to  me,  had  found  his  profit 
in  both  of  these  older  comedians,  and  made  for  him- 
self a  style  derived  partly  from  the  two  of  them, 
and  partly  from  his  own  independent  observations. 

He  described  to  an  inquirer  his  method  of  study. 
"When  I  have  to  create  a  part,  I  begin  by  reading 
the  play  with  the  greatest  attention  five  or  six  times. 
First,  I  consider  what  position  my  character  should 
occupy,  on  what  plane  in  the  picture  I  must  put  him. 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  199 

Then  I  study  his  psychology,  finding  out  what  he 
thinks,  what  he  is  morally.  I  deduce  what  he 
ought  to  be  physically,  what  will  be  his  carriage, 
his  manner  of  speaking,  his  gesture.  These  char- 
acteristics once  decided,  I  learn  the  part  without 
thinking  about  it  further;  then,  when  I  know  it, 
I  take  up  my  man  again,  and  closing  my  eyes,  I  say 
to  him:  'Recite  this  for  me.'  Then  I  see  him  de- 
livering the  speech,  the  sentence  I  asked  him  for; 
he  lives,  he  speaks,  he  gesticulates  before  me;  and 
then  I  have  only  to  imitate  him." 

He  used  to  declare  that  Moliere,  being  an  actor 
himself,  made  all  his  parts  relatively  easy  for  his 
actors  —  that  is  to  say,  his  speeches  lend  themselves 
to  oral  delivery,  they  fall  trippingly  off  the  tongue, 
and  they  suggest  the  appropriate  gestures.  This, 
it  may  be  noted  here,  is  what  Shakspere  also  does, 
and  Shakspere  was  an  actor  like  Moliere,  altho  ap- 
parently far  less  prominent  in  his  profession.  This 
is  what  Victor  Hugo  did  not  know  how  to  do,  not 
being  an  actor,  and  indeed  being  a  playwright  not 
so  much  by  native  gift  but  by  sheer  determination, 
by  main  strength,  so  to  speak.  Coquelin  discovered 
these  defects  in  Hugo's  method  when  he  appeared 
as  the  Don  Cesar  of  'Ruy  Bias,'  and  this  led  him 
to  refuse  to  undertake  the  Triboulet  of  the  *Roi 
s' Amuse'  (which  supplied  the  plot  of  the  Italian 
'Rigoletto,'  and  of  the  British  'Fool's  Revenge'). 

After  I  had  seen  him  in  'Ruy  Bias,'  Coquelin  dis- 
cussed Hugo's  plays  with  me.  "The  parts  in  them," 
he  said,  "are  easy  enough  for  actors  who  do  not 
really  know  their  business.  But  a  man  who  is  in 


200  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

the  habit  of  playing  Moliere,  of  studying  out  the 
characters  he  is  to  impersonate,  of  going  to  the 
bottom  of  them,  of  turning  them  inside  out  —  in  a 
word,  of  mastering  them,  soon  finds  he  can  do  noth- 
ing with  Hugo's  parts,  because  his  characters  are  all 
on  the  surface;  there  is  nothing  beneath.  Hugo  is  a 
great  poet,  and  he  scatters  beautiful  speeches  thruout 
all  his  pieces;  but  the  effect  of  these  exquisite  lines 
does  not  compensate  the  actor  for  the  want  of  a 
living,  breathing  human  being  to  personate.  Fail- 
ing to  find  the  humanity  in  a  Hugo  character,  the 
actor  has  to  fatigue  himself  with  extraneous  effects. 
In  Don  Cesar  I  could  finally  discover  nothing  but 
brilliant  speeches  and  factitious  movement.  Now 
Don  Cesar  has  only  two  acts  in  which  to  appear;  he 
has  a  few  words  only  in  the  first  and  then  he  bears 
on  his  shoulders  the  whole  burden  of  the  fourth  act. 
That  fourth  act  exhausts  me  every  time  I  play  it; 
and  in  the  theater  I  am  not  considered  a  weakling. 
In  the  'Etourdi'  I  play  Mascarille,  the  most  ample 
and  the  most  exacting  of  all  the  parts  in  Moliere; 
and  I  am  quite  as  fresh  at  the  end  of  the  fifth  act 
as  I  was  at  the  beginning  of  the  first.  But  I  come 
out  of  the  fourth  act  of  'Iluy  Bias'  completely  used 
up,  having  had  to  spend  all  my  strength  as  an  actor 
in  filling  the  void  left  by  the  poet." 

Coquelin's  conversation  was  always  interesting, 
partly  because  of  his  habit  of  seeking  first  principles, 
and  partly  because  of  the  full  flavor  of  his  own  in- 
dividuality. He  wrote  as  well  as  he  talked;  and  he 
revealed  his  acute  critical  faculty  in  half-a-score 
little  books  in  which  he  discussed  his  own  calling 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  201 

('I/ Art  du  Comedien'),  several  of  the  leading  comic 
characters  of  Moliere  (notably  Tartuffe),  and  sev- 
eral of  the  contemporary  poets  who  were  his 
friends;  especially  noteworthy  is  his  analysis  of  'Un 
Poete  Philosophe,'  Sully-Prudhomme.  Of  course, 
he  wrote  well;  all  actors  do  who  happen  to  have 
something  to  say,  since  they  acquire  unconsciously 
vocabulary  and  style  from  the  parts  which  they 
are  called  upon  to  learn,  parts  composed  by  men 
who  are  liberal  with  the  winged  words  of  poetry,  or 
who  command  a  polished  prose. 

He  let  fall  to  me,  by  accident,  a  few  years  before 
his  death,  that  certain  of  his  friends  in  the  Academic 
Frangaise  had  suggested  his  becoming  a  candidate 
for  admission  to  that  august  body  of  men  of  letters. 
He  explained  that  the  intimation  that  he  might  be 
welcomed  among  the  Academicians  had  been  very 
grateful  to  him,  but  that  he  was  not  altogether  as- 
sured of  the  success  of  his  candidacy  should  he  ever 
propose  it,  since  he  understood  that  Brunetiere 
would  combat  it  vehemently.  Slight  as  was  Coque- 
lin's  literary  baggage,  it  was  far  weightier  than  that 
of  certain  other  men  who  had  recently  been  elected 
—  the  Duke  d'Audifrey-Pasquier,  for  example,  who 
was  credited  with  spelling  Academy  with  two  c's. 

IV 

Massing  together  memories  not  only  of  1878  but 
of  1881  and  1883,  and  of  other  years  when  I  hap- 
pened to  be  in  Paris  for  part  of  the  summer,  I  must 
here  take  up  my  relations  with  other  Frenchmen, 


202  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

more  or  less  connected  with  the  theater.  It  was  in 
1878  that  Coquelin  showed  me  over  the  Theatre 
Frangais  and  displayed  to  me  its  accumulated  trea- 
sures, manuscripts,  drawings  and  engravings,  pic- 
tures and  statues;  and  I  wrote  an  account  of  all 
that  I  had  seen  for  an  American  magazine.  For 
other  American  magazines  I  prepared  papers  on  the 
several  Parisian  playhouses,  utilizing  the  book  of 
Charles  Nuitter  on  the  opera,  and  more  especially 
the  volume  of  Francisque  Sarcey's  'Comediens  et 
Comediennes'  which  considered  the  actors  and  ac- 
tresses of  the  Comedie-Frangaise.  This  scattered 
material  I  rearranged  and  amplified  as  best  I  could; 
and  in  the  spring  of  1880  I  published  it  as  my  first 
book,  the  'Theaters  of  Paris.'  In  gratitude  to 
Coquelin  I  dedicated  the  little  volume  to  him;  and 
I  rejoiced  to  receive  in  return  a  letter  in  which  he 
declared  that  my  appreciations  were  delicate  and 
exact,  adding  that  more  than  one  French  critic 
could  find  in  my  book  suggestions  by  which  they 
might  profit.  Perhaps  a  dedicatee  could  say  no 
less;  yet  the  vanity  of  the  author  promptly  re- 
sponded to  this  most  agreeable  titillation. 

In  the  eighteen  months  that  followed  the  publi- 
cation of  this  first  book  I  made  ready  a  second,  a 
study  of  the  more  important  of  the  'French  Drama- 
tists of  the  Nineteenth  Century';  and  this  was  pub- 
lished in  the  fall  of  1881.  Oddly  enough,  no  French 
historian  of  dramatic  literature  had  then  under- 
taken to  deal,  in  detail,  with  the  years  in  which  the 
Romanticist  movement  had  been  duly  followed  by 
the  Realistic  movement.  I  was  plowing  a  field  which 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  203 

the  French  themselves  had  neglected,  altho  of  late 
years  it  has  been  carefully  cultivated  by  critic 
after  critic.  As  a  matter  of  record,  I  may  note 
here  that  I  brought  out  in  1890  a  second  edition 
with  a  consideration  of  the  developments  of  the 
French  drama  which  had  taken  place  during  the 
intervening  decade;  and  that  in  1900  a  third  and 
final  edition  appeared,  with  another  added  chap- 
ter carrying  on  the  story  to  the  end  of  the  century. 
The  reviews  which  were  printed  in  the  French  and 
British  periodicals  in  the  months  that  followed  the 
first  publication  of  the  'French  Dramatists'  occasion- 
ally expressed  surprise  that  a  New  Yorker  should 
take  so  Parisian  a  point  of  view.  Francisque  Sarcey, 
in  the  friendly  notice  which  appeared  in  his  weekly 
article  in  the  Temps,  declared  that  he  would  "re- 
proach the  author  with  only  one  fault,  altho  this 
reproach  might  sound  in  his  ear  like  praise:  he  is 
too  Parisian."  Perhaps  this  suggestion  that  I  was 
sometimes  too  resolutely  French  in  my  criticism  of 
French  writers  may  be  set  off  against  a  later  asser- 
tion that  I  was  sometimes  too  strenuously  American 
in  my  criticism  of  British  writers.  A  critic,  who 
strives  honestly  to  see  men  and  things  as  they  are, 
or,  at  least,  as  they  appear  to  him  in  the  dry  light  of 
disinterestedness,  is  likely  now  and  again  to  be  dis- 
concerting to  hasty  readers  resentful  of  any  sudden 
jar  to  their  prejudices. 

When  Sarcey  said  pleasant  things  about  my 
'French  Dramatists,'  he  was  only  returning  the 
compliments  I  had  paid  him  in  the  Nation  on  his 
'Comediens  et  Comediennes,'  one  of  the  most  in- 


204  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

teresting  and  suggestive  books  of  commingled  bio- 
graphy and  criticism  which  it  has  ever  been  my 
good  fortune  to  read.  In  his  letter  acknowledging 
my  review  Sarcey  admitted  that  my  sympathetic 
appreciation  of  his  work  was  more  than  usually 
grateful  to  him  since  his  Parisian  colleagues  had 
not  been  at  all  cordial  in  their  reception  of  his 
collection  of  histrionic  studies.  He  ended  his  brief 
note  by  proffering  "a  cordial  clasp  of  the  hand." 
This  encouraged  me  in  August,  1881,  to  see  if  this 
metaphor  might  not  be  transformed  into  a  fact. 

I  had  long  been  a  regular  reader  of  his  substan- 
tial articles  which  appeared  every  Sunday  after- 
noon in  the  Temps;  and  I  admired  intensely  his 
abounding  interest  in  all  that  related  to  the  theater, 
and  his  marvellous  understanding  of  the  underlying 
principles  of  the  twin  arts  of  acting  and  play -writing. 
I  had  absorbed  my  first  impressions  of  the  range 
and  power  of  the  drama  from  Schlegel;  but  I  had 
come  to  see  that  the  ultimate  value  of  the  German's 
criticism  was  vitiated  by  his  hostility  not  only  to 
the  classicist  doctrines  of  the  French,  but  to  the 
French  themselves,  even  to  Moliere,  the  greatest 
of  comic  dramatists.  In  a  man's  life,  as  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  world,  certain  writings  may  have  been 
of  inestimable  value  and  yet  they  may  be  super- 
seded in  time  by  other  writings  which  they  have 
helped  to  make  possible.  Even  tho  they  form  the 
corner-stone  of  the  first  pier  of  the  bridge  of  progress, 
the  footpath  for  passengers  hangs  so  high  above 
them  that  there  is  no  need  now  to  climb  down  to 
the  water's  edge  just  to  see  how  they  look.  While 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  205 

it  was  Schlegel  who  had  opened  my  eyes,  it  was 
thru  the  spectacles  of  Sarcey  that  I  was  later  to 
look  at  the  stage. 

Sarcey  was  then  settled  in  the  house  in  the  Rue 
Douai,  which  his  friend,  Charles  Gamier,  the  archi- 
tect of  the  Opera,  had  adapted  for  his  use;  and  when 
I  presented  myself  on  the  one  day  in  the  week  when 
he  was  known  to  be  accessible  to  all  callers,  I  was 
at  once  shown  up  into  the  two-story  studio  which 
he  had  taken  for  his  library,  and  which  had  for  its 
most  conspicuous  pieces  of  furniture  the  desk  at 
which  the  fecund  journalist  wrote  his  innumerable 
daily  and  weekly  and  monthly  articles,  and  the  leg- 
endary Red  Divan  which  he  had  made  almost  as 
famous  as  the  Red  Waistcoat  of  Th&ophile  Gautier. 

When  I  recalled  myself  to  his  memory  as  his  Amer- 
ican correspondent  he  gave  me  the  cordial  grasp  of 
the  hand  for  which  I  had  come;  and  at  once  he  made 
me  feel  at  home.  He  was  already  corpulent,  and 
he  had  a  correspondingly  broad  face,  girt  with 
grizzled  hair.  Thru  his  ample  spectacles  I  felt 
his  gaze  of  shrewd  benignity  fixed  upon  me;  and  I 
was  glad  that  he  soon  recognized  in  his  young  visitor 
one  almost  as  keenly  interested  in  the  theater  as  he 
was  himself.  In  the  course  of  that  summer  and  of 
other  succeeding  summers  I  had  the  pleasure  of 
climbing  his  stairs  half-a-dozen  times;  and  I  was 
always  greeted  with  the  cordial  clasp  of  the  hand 
and  with  the  transfixing  glance  which  seemed  to 
"size  me  up,"  to  use  our  expressive  Americanism. 
Once  he  retained  me  to  the  midday  breakfast  to 
which  he  invited  all  the  visitors  who  chanced  to 


206  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

drop  in  that  morning, —  authors,  fellow-critics,  act- 
ors and  actresses.  Once,  four  or  five  years  later,  I 
heard  him  lecture,  or  rather  talk  a  criticism  of  the 
book  of  the  week,  —  it  happened  to  be  Maupassant's 
'Bel-Ami,'  which  he  held  to  be  a  complete  mis- 
representation of  the  facts  of  Parisian  journalism. 
And  on  my  last  visit  to  his  house,  when  I  was  tak- 
ing my  leave,  I  told  him  that  I  was  about  to  return 
to  New  York  and  asked  if  there  was  anything  I 
could  do  for  him  on  the  far  side  of  the  Atlantic. 

"Nothing,"  he  answered,  standing  at  the  top  of 
the  twisting  staircase.  "But  yes!  Talk  about  me 
as  much  as  you  can!"  ("Mais,  si!  Parlez  de  moi 
beaucoupl") 

"That  is  what  I  am  always  doing,"  I  replied. 
("C'est  ce  que  jefais  toujours.")  And  his  genial  laugh 
followed  me  down  to  the  door.  He  had  his  little 
vanities  —  like  the  rest  of  us.  And  I  have  diligently 
obeyed  his  parting  request.  I  have  spoken  about 
him  incessantly,  in  gratitude  for  all  I  acquired 
from  his  work. 


I  had  specific  occasion  for  gratitude  as  a  result 
of  my  first  visit  to  him  in  1881.  A  week  earlier,  in 
the  final  days  of  July,  I  had  been  taken  by  a  friend 
to  the  annual  competition  for  prizes,  by  the  'prentice 
players  of  the  Conservatory  of  Music  and  Declama- 
tion, and  I  had  sat  for  several  hours  hearing  scene 
after  scene  from  dramatists  ancient  and  modern, 
presented  by  aspiring  young  actors  and  actresses, 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  207 

of  whom  I  now  can  recall  by  name  only  three, 
Galipaux,  Gamier  and  Raphael  Duflos.  We  were 
in  the  box  assigned  to  the  Ministry  of  Fine  Arts; 
and  in  the  center  of  the  semicircle  was  the  wider 
box  wherein  the  judges  sat  enthroned,  Ambroise 
Thomas,  the  composer  of  'Mignon'  and  of  'Ham- 
let,' presiding,  surrounded  by  Perrin,  the  manager 
of  the  Theatre  Frangais,  the  younger  Dumas,  and 
Auguste  Maquet,  the  partner  of  the  elder  Dumas 
in  writing  the  'Three  Musketeers/  Three  of  the 
four  professors  of  acting,  Regnier,  Delaunay  and 
Worms,  sat  in  a  side-box;  the  fourth  professor, 
Got,  I  failed  to  discover, — altho  he  must  have  been 
present. 

In  that  first  interview  with  Sarcey  I  happened  to 
mention  that  I  had  been  present  at  this  conservatory 
competition.  And  he  promptly  told  me  that  the 
prizes  were  to  be  distributed  the  next  day,  and  that, 
as  I  had  been  so  much  interested  by  the  competition, 
I  ought  not  to  miss  seeing  the  awards  to  the  success- 
ful competitors.  "And  it  will  be  unusually  inter- 
esting to-morrow,"  he  added.  "Got  is  to  be  deco- 
rated. He  is  to  receive  the  cross  of  the  Legion  of 
Honor." 

I  responded  that  I  should  like  nothing  better 
than  to  be  a  spectator  at  this  event,  but  that  as  an 
unknown  stranger  in  a  strange  city,  I  had  no  chance 
of  receiving  a  ticket. 

"But  you  can  have  mine,"  he  declared  at  once. 
"I  can't  go  myself.  I  never  miss  a  reception  at 
the  French  Academy  and  to-morrow  Renan  is  to 
deliver  an  address." 


208  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Thus  assured  that  I  was  not  depriving  him  of 
what  to  me  would  be  a  precious  possession,  I  gladly 
accepted.  And  the  next  day  at  one  I  presented 
Sarcey's  ticket  at  the  door  of  the  tiny  theater  of 
the  Conservatory  and  was  duly  admitted.  Then  I 
found  that  I  was  privileged  to  be  present  at  what 
was  emphatically  a  historic  occasion,  for  it  was  the 
first  time  that  any  actor  was  to  be  admitted  to  the 
Legion  of  Honor,  while  he  was  still  in  the  active 
exercise  of  his  profession.  It  is  true  that  Regnier 
had  been  decorated,  but  only  as  a  professor  in 
the  Conservatory  and  only  after  he  retired  from  the 
stage.  And  in  honor  of  the  significant  event,  of  the 
signal  honor  to  be  bestowed  for  the  first  time  upon 
an  actor  who  had  not  yet  renounced  his  calling, 
the  little  hall  was  even  more  crowded  than  was  cus- 
tomary, if  such  a  suggestion  is  not  inconceivable. 
The  boxes  blazed  with  the  beauties  of  the  Comedie- 
Frangaise,  among  whom  I  soon  singled  out  Jeanne 
Samary,  with  her  infectious  laughter  and  her  tip- 
tilted  nose.  The  excitement  of  the  gathering  was 
contagious  and  I  was  conscious  of  sympathetic 
thrills  of  doubt  and  hope  when  the  Under-Secretary 
of  Fine  Arts  kept  us  all  waiting,  and  when  I  was 
told  that  this  was  because  the  old  soldiers  who 
constitute  the  Council  of  the  Legion  of  Honor  were 
still  hostile  to  the  idea  of  sharing  their  distinction 
with  a  mere  actor. 

At  last,  after  a  harassing  delay,  the  Under- 
Secretary  arrived  and  the  tension  was  relaxed.  The 
Prime  Minister,  Jules  Ferry,  had  overruled  the  old 
fogies  of  the  Council  of  the  Legion  of  Honor.  Then 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  209 

Ambroise  Thomas  awarded  the  prizes  to  the  success- 
ful pupils  whom  I  had  seen  competing;  and  yet 
this  won  but  a  languid  attention  from  the  audience, 
who  had  come  for  an  event  far  more  exciting  than 
this  annual  festival,  for  a  reward  more  spectacular 
and  absolutely  unprecedented.  After  an  intermina- 
ble list  had  been  read  the  Under-Secretary  rose; 
and  to  the  disappointment  of  all  he  began  by  be- 
stowing the  unimportant  insignia  of  the  absurdly 
named  Officer  of  Academy  upon  three  or  four  of 
the  professors  of  instrumental  music  in  the  Con- 
servatory, upon  the  instructor  of  the  trombone  for 
one,  and  upon  the  instructor  of  the  double-bass  for 
another. 

Finally  the  supreme  moment  arrived.  The  Under- 
secretary paused  and  cleared  his  throat.  Then  he 
raised  his  voice:  "A  still  higher  recompense  has  been 
reserved  for  M.  Got — "  and  he  could  go  no  further, 
so  immediate  was  the  interruption  of  tumultuous 
applause,  during  which  Got  rose  to  his  feet  from 
the  group  on  the  stage  which  surrounded  the 
speaker. 

When  there  was  once  more  comparative  silence 
the  Under-Secretary  began  again:  "A  still  higher 
recompense  has  been  reserved  for  M.  Got,  professor 
of  declamation.  He  is  made  a  Knight  of  the  Legion 
of  Honor.  It  is  as  professor  in  the  Conservatory 
that  M.  Got  obtains  this  high  recompense  for  his 


services." 


Here  the  Under-Secretary  hesitated  for  a  moment. 
The  applause  died  down  instantly.  A  sudden  chill 
pervaded  the  atmosphere  of  the  theater.  The 


210  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

whole  audience  wanted  to  see  the  cross  bestowed  on 
Got  as  a  comedian  and  not  on  Got  as  a  professor. 

But  the  Under-Secretary  of  the  Fine  Arts  was  as 
sensitive  to  this  drop  in  the  temperature  as  I  was; 
and  he  at  once  rose  to  the  occasion.  "Neverthe- 
less," he  went  on,  raising  his  voice  only  a  little,  but 
spacing  his  words  more  carefully,  "nevertheless, 
the  Government  in  decorating  the  professor  of  the 
Conservatory  has  not  been  able  to  forget  that  it  is 
honoring  also  the  dean  of  the  Comedie-Frangaise !" 

Then  again  the  applause  thundered  forth  led  by 
Coquelin  and  by  Delaunay.  The  fair  occupants 
of  the  boxes  stood  up  and  clapped  their  hands. 
Everybody  was  happy  at  last,  for  the  almost  un- 
hoped-for had  come  to  pass.  Got  advanced  to  the 
Under-Secretary,  who  took  the  red  ribbon  from  his 
own  buttonhole  and  fastened  it  in  Got's.  Then  he 
gave  Got  the  accolade,  —  that  is,  he  kissed  him. 
And  the  triumphant  ceremony  was  complete, — 
excepting  only  that  Delaunay  also  embraced  Got 
as  soon  as  his  comrade  took  his  seat  again  by  the 
side  of  his  fellow-professors. 

As  soon  as  I  could  get  out  of  the  throng,  I  took 
a  cab  straight  to  the  Theatre  Frangais,  for  I  felt 
sure  that  if  Got  was  to  appear  that  evening  his 
reception  would  be  most  cordial.  By  good  luck 
I  was  able  to  get  a  good  seat;  and  I  had  the  delight 
of  being  present  at  a  marvellously  brilliant  per- 
formance of  the  most  brilliant  of  Moliere's  comedies, 
the  'Femmes  Savantes.'  Altho  it  was  early  in 
August  and  not  a  few  of  the  most  important  actors 
were  away  on  vacation,  they  returned  loyally  to 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES 

support  their  leader.  Got  himself  was  Tressotin, 
of  course,  Delaunay  was  Clitandre,  Thiron  was 
Chrysale,  and  Coquelin  resumed  for  once  the  little 
part  of  Vadius,  who  appears  only  in  a  single  scene. 
Madeleine  Brohan  was  Philaminthe,  Baretta  was 
Henriette,  Favart  was  Arsinoe,  Jouassain  was  Belise, 
and  Dinah-Felix  (the  sister  of  Rachel)  was  Martine. 
I  doubt  if  so  many  of  the  Associates  had  been  seen 
together  in  a  single  play  of  Moliere's  since  a  time 
whereof  the  memory  of  man  runneth  not  to  the  con- 
trary, as  the  old  law-phrase  puts  it. 

I  can  recall  now  without  effort  the  perfect  compre- 
hension of  what  comedy  can  be  and  ought  to  be 
displayed  by  Got  and  Coquelin  in  the  disputation 
of  the  two  pedants  —  that  most  humorous  episode 
which  is  the  comic  analog  of  the  tragic  quarrel  of 
Brutus  and  Cassius.  I  thought  Got's  rendering 
of  the  self-satisfied  and  self-seeking  Tressotin  mas- 
terly, altho  he  was  a  little  hard  at  times,  and  a  little 
rigid,  as  was  his  wont.  Coquelin  was  subtler  and 
suppler  in  Vadius;  and  to  my  astonishment  he  was 
able  to  quench  the  fire  of  his  glance  and  to  keep  his 
gaze  down  to  a  dead,  leaden  level,  never  allowing 
a  chance  flash  of  his  eyes  to  suggest  that  he  was 
other  than  the  character  he  was  assuming.  The 
accomplishment  of  this  feat  is  credited  also  to  Gar- 
rick;  but  till  I  saw  Coquelin  achieve  it  I  had  thought 
it  impossible.  And  I  was  not  surprised  when  I 
found  Austin  Dobson  likening  Garrick  to  Coquelin 
"with  his  mercurial  presence  and  the  magnetism 
of  his  impetuous  ubiquity." 


THESE  MANY  YEARS 


VI 

In  the  course  of  my  summer  visits  to  Paris  I 
met  Jules  Claretie,  who  had  succeeded  Perrin  as 
manager  of  the  Theatre  Frangais;  Francois  Coppee, 
then  the  librarian  of  the  Comedie-Frangaise ;  and 
Georges  Monval,  the  custodian  of  its  archives  and  the 
compiler  of  an  invaluable  'Chronologic  Molieresque.' 
Monval  was  then  editing  the  monthly  Molieriste, 
a  review  which  he  issued  for  ten  years,  and  which 
is  a  storehouse  of  useful  material  for  lovers  of 
Moliere.  To  the  number  of  the  Molieriste  for 
August,  1881, 1  contributed  a  little  paper  on  *  Moliere 
en  Amerique,'  my  sole  effort  to  compose  in  a  tongue 
other  than  my  own;  and  my  vanity  was  again  most 
agreeably  titillated  when  the  Temps  found  my 
essay  amusing  enough  to  fill  one  of  its  broad  columns. 

At  the  exposition  of  1878  I  had  been  greatly 
attracted  by  a  special  exhibition  illustrating  the 
history  of  the  theater  in  France  prepared  under 
the  direction  of  a  distinguished  committee  of  ex- 
perts. The  chief  feature  of  this  exhibition  was  a 
series  of  models  of  theaters  and  of  the  sets  needed 
for  a  number  of  early  French  pieces.  When  I 
returned  to  Paris  in  1881,  I  found  that  the  whole 
collection  had  been  deposited  in  the  library  of  the 
Opera,  of  which  Charles  Nuitter  was  then  the  libra- 
rian. By  assiduous  and  insidious  appeals  Nuitter 
had  been  able  to  obtain  for  the  library  the  wing 
of  the  new  Opera  which  had  been  intended  to  serve 
as  the  private  reception-rooms  of  the  deposed  and 


PARISIAN  MEMORIES  213 

departed  Emperor  and  Empress.  Nuitter  most 
kindly  made  me  at  home  in  the  library  of  the  Opera, 
and  expounded  the  treasures  he  was  guarding.  The 
more  I  studied  the  series  of  models,  representing 
sets  in  the  successive  epochs  of  the  French  stage, 
the  more  illuminative  I  found  them.  An  old  play 
seemed  to  start  to  new  life  when  I  was  thus  enabled 
to  visualize  its  original  performance. 

I  found  myself  wishing  that  it  might  be  possible 
to  do  for  the  history  of  the  English  drama  what  had 
been  done  for  the  history  of  the  French  drama. 
Thirty  years  later  this  wish  was  realized  when  a 
dramatic  museum  was  established  at  Columbia 
University  to  contain  a  historic  sequence  of  models 
carefully  chosen  to  make  plain  the  differences  in 
size  and  shape  between  the  several  theaters  which 
have  followed  each  other  in  the  various  countries 
possessing  a  living  drama  of  their  own.  The  scope 
of  the  collection  now  being  gathered  in  New  York 
is  even  broader  than  that  begun  in  Paris  long  ago; 
and  the  American  specimens  have  been  drawn  from 
a  wider  field,  since  the  French  restricted  their  efforts 
to  their  own  drama.  Yet  three  or  four  of  the  most 
impressive  and  most  useful  models  in  the  collection 
of  Columbia  University  are  copies  of  those  preserved 
at  the  Opera  in  Paris. 


CHAPTER  X 
CONCERNING   CLUBS 


ONE  June  evening  in  1878,  while  I  was  stroll- 
ing in  the  lobby  of  the  Lyceum  Theater,  in 
London,  during  an  intermission  of  'Vander- 
decken,'  in  which  Henry  Irving  was  appearing  as  the 
Ely  ing  Dutchman,  Laurence  Hut  ton  came  up  to  me 
and  introduced  himself;  and  thus  began  one  of  the 
most  satisfactory  friendships  of  my  life.  For  friend- 
ship Hutton  had  a  special  gift.  He  was  companion- 
able, kindly,  cheerful,  unpretending;  and  he  was 
greatly  liked  by  all  sorts  and  conditions  of  men.  He 
was  fond  of  books  and  familiar  with  writers  of  books. 
His  interest  was  rather  in  the  memorabilia  of  author- 
ship than  in  the  criticism  of  literature;  and  he  was  a 
specialist  in  the  topography  of  the  history  of  English 
literature,  as  he  proved  in  his  'Literary  Landmarks 
of  London.' 

His  interest  in  the  theater  and  in  stage-history 
was  as  keen  as  mine;  and  he  introduced  himself 
to  me  because  I  had  written  to  him  several  years 
earlier,  expressing  my  hope  that  he  would  make  a 
book  out  of  the  rambling  reminiscences  of  plays 
and  players  which  he  was  then  contributing  to  an 
evening  paper.  He  was  one  of  the  most  intimate 
friends  of  Edwin  Booth  and  of  Lawrence  Barrett, 
and  when  we  agreed  to  edit  in  conjunction  a  series 

214 


CONCERNING   CLUBS  215 

of  five  volumes  on  the  *  Actors  and  Actresses  of  Great 
Britain  and  the  United  States  from  the  Time  of 
David  Garrick  to  the  Present  Time,'  he  persuaded 
Booth  to  undertake  his  only  contribution  to  litera- 
ture, a  pair  of  racy  and  succulent  papers  on  his 
father,  Junius  Brutus  Booth,  and  on  his  father's 
greater  rival,  Edmund  Kean. 

Hutton  and  I  also  collaborated  in  editing  John 
Bernard's  'Retrospections  of  America.'  In  reading 
Bernard's  'Retrospections  of  the  Stage,'  edited  by 
his  son,  Bayle  Bernard  (the  playwright  who  had  first 
attempted  a  dramatization  of  'Rip  Van  Winkle'),  I 
noted  that  the  actor  had  left  a  record  of  his  career 
on  the  American  stage;  and  I  had  written  to  Mrs. 
Bayle  Bernard  to  inquire  if  these  later  reminiscences 
were  in  shape  for  publication.  She  had  sent  me 
the  manuscript,  and  we  found  it  well  worth  printing, 
more  particularly  because  of  a  careful  account  of 
one  of  the  English  comedian's  meetings  with  George 
Washington.  We  provided  an  introduction  and 
notes;  and  we  procured  its  publication  first  in  a 
magazine  and  then  as  a  book. 

Hutton  was  a  graceful  writer  in  style  and  a  very 
forcible  writer  in  penmanship.  He  used  a  fat  pen, 
and  his  calligraphy  was  bold  and  black.  I  once  saw 
a  postman  about  to  cross  the  street  to  my  house, 
and  holding  in  his  hand  a  letter;  and  even  at  that 
distance  I  made  sure  that  it  was  from  Hutton. 
Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich  once  complained  to  me  that 
a  letter  of  his  had  not  been  promptly  answered  by 
Hutton,  adding:  "But  I  suppose  Laurence  hasn't 
yet  laid  in  his  winter  ink !" 


216  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Hutton  was  quite  unpretending,  and  he  had  a 
sufficient  sense  of  humor  to  take  a  joke  on  himself 
and  to  tell  it  with  appreciation  of  the  point  which 
transfixed  him.  As  a  very  young  man  he  had  filled 
for  a  little  while  a  place  in  a  wholesale  produce  office, 
which  bought  from  the  market-gardeners  and  sold 
to  the  grocers.  As  his  customers  were  plain  people 
he  always  took  off  his  gloves  at  least  two  blocks 
before  he  reached  the  store.  One  day  a  farmer 
came  in  and  greeted  him  with  a  question  about  a 
rival  commission  house.  Hutton  explained  that 
they  were  competitors,  and  that,  therefore,  he  knew 
little  about  them,  but  that,  so  far  as  he  knew,  they 
were  gentlemen. 

"That's  just  what  I  thought,"  replied  the  plain- 
spoken  farmer.  "I  ain't  no  gentleman  myself  and 
I  don't  propose  to  do  business  with  no  gentlemen. 
I'll  sell  my  goods  to  you!" 

Another  anecdote  he  used  to  tell  against  himself 
bore  on  his  unfortunate  inability  to  make  his  tongue 
obey  his  brain,  a  failing  which  led  him  on  more  than 
one  occasion  to  make  infelicitous  slips.  He  was  a 
friend  of  Helen  Hunt,  the  author  of  'Ramona'  and 
of  the  Saxe  Holm  stories;  and  he  went  to  call  on 
her  when  she  visited  New  York  for  the  first  time 
after  her  second  marriage.  All  the  way  to  pay  his 
visit  he  kept  saying  to  himself:  "I  must  remember 
to  call  her  Mrs.  Jackson,  Mrs.  Jackson,  Mrs.  Jack- 
son." But  when  she  had  shaken  hands  with  him  she 
introduced  the  gentleman  standing  by  her  side: 
"My  husband."  And  Hutton  unhesitatingly  re- 
marked: "Very  glad  to  meet  you,  Mr.  Hunt!" 


CONCERNING  CLUBS  217 

During  the  serial  publication  of  the  life  of  Lincoln 
by  John  Hay  and  J.  G.  Nicolay,  Button  stayed  a 
day  or  two  at  a  hotel  in  Leamington;  and  there,  in 
the  smoking-room,  one  evening  he  fell  into  conver- 
sation with  a  rural  dean,  who,  as  soon  as  he  had 
discovered  that  his  fellow-guest  was  an  American, 
began  to  talk  about  Lincoln.  "I've  been  readin' 
those  articles  about  Lincoln  in  that  magazine  of 
yours,  very  interesting  very  interestin',  indeed. 
Have  you  read  them?"  Button  admitted  their 
perusal.  "Then  perhaps  you  will  agree  with  me," 
returned  the  English  clergyman;  "I'm  inclined  to 
believe  that  that  man  Lincoln  must  have  been  the 
most  remarkable  nigger  that  ever  lived.  Don't 
you  think  so?"  And  altho  Hutton  spent  the  better 
part  of  the  evening  in  trying  to  persuade  his  friendly 
companion  that  the  author  of  the  Gettysburg  address 
had  been  born  free  and  white,  his  explanations  failed 
to  carry  conviction.  When  Button  told  me  this, 
I  was  moved  to  cap  it  with  a  story  told  by  my  father 
about  another  English  clergyman  who  maintained 
that  our  Civil  War  was  absurd.  :<You  have  only 
to  look  at  a  map  and  see  how  narrow  the  isthmus 
is  that  unites  them  to  see  that  God  didn't  mean 
North  and  South  America  to  be  under  the  same 
government."  Taken  together  these  two  anecdotes 
tend  to  confirm  Charles  Dudley  Warner's  assertion 
that  there  must  be  schools  in  England  where  they 
teach  ignorance  of  America. 

Once  when  Button  and  I  returned  to  America 
on  the  same  boat  we  had  for  a  fellow-passenger  a 
blatant  man  who  made  his  abhorrent  personality 


218  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

obtrusively  offensive  in  the  smoking-room.  He 
raised  his  raucous  voice  in  frequent  self -laudation; 
he  gave  himself  out  as  a  Scotsman,  a  sailor,  a  great 
traveller,  a  seer  of  strange  sights.  After  an  unusually 
protracted  revelation  of  his  peculiarities,  this  per- 
son left  the  smoking-room  one  afternoon  banging  the 
door  after  him,  and  a  hush  fell  upon  the  crowd. 
Hutton  waited  a  moment,  and  then  addressing  me, 
but  raising  his  voice  a  little  so  that  it  carried,  he 
remarked:  "I  have  no  desire  to  say  anything  against 
the  gentleman  who  has  just  left  us  —  but  he  is  not 
a  Scotchman  as  he  says  he  is.  He  says  Edinfom/." 
Whereupon  a  quiet  little  man  in  a  far  corner  looked 
up  from  his  game  of  patience  and  contributed  this: 
"He  ain't  no  sailor,  neither.  He  spits  to  wind- 
ward!" And  then  silence  again  enveloped  us. 

It  was  early  in  the  eighties  that  the  Tile  Club  was 
founded  by  a  group  of  illustrators.  It  held  its 
meetings  in  a  back  building  in  Tenth  Street  —  the 
same  house  where  Hopkinson  Smith  laid  the  scene 
of  'Colonel  Carter  of  Cartersville.'  Elihu  Vedder, 
altho  a  resident  of  Rome,  had  been  elected  to  the 
Tile  Club;  but,  as  it  happened,  he  was  not  able  to 
be  present  at  any  of  its  gatherings  until  he  came  to 
one  which  Hutton  attended  as  the  guest  of  Stan- 
ford White.  When  Vedder  entered  the  outer  room, 
it  chanced  that  Hutton  and  White  and  Arthur  B. 
Frost  were  seated  side  by  side  on  a  settee;  and  all 
three  of  them  were  then  tall  men,  with  reddish  hair 
and  full,  drooping,  reddish  mustaches.  Now,  Vedder 
was  at  that  time  also  a  tall  man  with  reddish  hair 
and  a  full,  drooping,  reddish  mustache.  When  he 


CONCERNING  CLUBS  219 

came  in,  he  paused  in  front  of  the  settee  on  which 
were  sitting  the  three  men  who  looked  more  or  less 
like  each  other  and  like  him.  He  knew  White  and 
Hutton  very  well,  but  Frost  he  did  not  know.  He 
glanced  at  them  for  a  moment  and  they  returned 
his  gaze  in  silence.  Then  he  went  to  the  mantel- 
piece and  took  down  a  little  mirror,  and  turned  back 
to  the  settee.  He  solemnly  compared  his  own  face 
in  the  looking-glass,  first  with  White's,  then  with 
Frost's  and  finally  with  Button's.  This  done  to 
his  satisfaction,  he  stepped  up  to  Frost  and  held  out 
his  hand  saying,  "Here's  another  chimpanzee  to 
make  up  your  quartet." 

n 

In  1885,  Hutton  and  I  joined  forces  with  half-a- 
dozen  others  equally  interested  in  the  history  of 
the  American  stage  and  established  the  Dunlap 
Society  to  print  books  relating  to  the  theater  in  the 
United  States.  We  named  our  book  club  after 
William  Dunlap,  the  earliest  of  our  professional 
playwrights.  I  was  elected  secretary,  and  with  the 
loyal  assistance  of  Hutton  I  got  out  a  dozen  volumes 
in  the  course  of  the  next  half-dozen  years.  I  pro- 
vided introductions  for  two  plays,  Dunlap's  '  Andre' 
and  Burk's  'Battle  of  Bunker  Hill';  and  Hutton 
made  two  collections  of  poetic  addresses  delivered 
in  American  theaters  in  the  course  of  the  preceding 
century.  After  a  trance  of  several  years  the  Dun- 
lap  Society  was  revived  in  1900  with  Douglas  Taylor 
as  president;  and  it  issued  a  second  series  of  publica- 


220  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

tions.  Then  it  entered  on  another  stage  of  sus- 
pended animation  until  1914,  when  it  was  again 
resuscitated  and  I  was  elected  president  with  the 
definite  understanding  that  the  position  was  to  be 
absolutely  honorary. 

With  Button  again  I  took  part  in  founding  another 
organization.  There  was  then  in  New  York  no  dis- 
tinctively literary  club,  altho  many  of  the  older 
authors  were  members  of  the  Century  Association. 
It  occurred  to  Charles  de  Kay  that  it  might  be  possi- 
ble to  gather  together  the  men  of  letters  residing  in 
or  near  New  York;  and  on  a  call  from  him  seven  of 
us  met  on  October  21,  1882,  at  the  house  of  his 
brother-in-law,  Richard  Watson  Gilder  —  a  very 
picturesque  residence  in  Fifteenth  Street  just  east 
of  Union  Square,  a  dwelling  transmogrified  from  a 
commodious  stable.  Then  and  there  we  seven  — 
De  Kay,  Gilder,  Edward  Eggleston,  Noah  Brooks, 
Edmund  Clarence  Stedman,  Hut  ton  and  I  —  agreed 
to  organize  the  Authors  Club.  At  a  second  meeting, 
held  a  week  later  at  Stedman's,  other  men  of  letters 
were  present  by  invitation;  and  a  committee  was 
appointed  to  draft  a  constitution.  And  at  a  third 
meeting,  held  at  Button's,  this  constitution  was  for- 
mally accepted. 

It  was  only  by  the  exercise  of  remarkable  prevision 
that  the  early  members  were  able  to  avert  immediate 
discord  and  imminent  disruption,  as  there  were  at 
least  two  of  the  twenty -five  organizing  members  who 
aspired  to  the  signal  honor  of  being  the  first  president 
of  the  new  club.  This  difficulty  was  evaded  by  the 
simple  device  of  not  having  a  president  and  of 


CONCERNING  CLUBS 

confiding  the  government  of  the  association  to  an  ex- 
ecutive council  which  was  to  elect  its  own  chairman. 

For  the  first  year  or  two  the  Authors  Club  held  its 
meetings  here  and  there,  sometimes  at  the  houses  of 
different  members  and  sometimes  at  restaurants. 
After  a  while  it  accepted  the  hospitality  of  the  Tile 
Club;  and  a  year  or  two  later  it  engaged  quarters 
of  its  own.  It  elected  Matthew  Arnold  as  its  first 
honorary  member;  and  to  him,  when  he  came  to 
America,  in  1883,  to  lecture,  it  gave  its  first  reception. 

From  its  earliest  meetings  the  Authors  Club 
justified  the  hopes  of  its  founders;  and  for  the  first 
time  in  the  history  of  New  York  the  members  of 
the  writing  craft  were  able  to  get  acquainted  with 
each  other.  We  soon  discovered  that  we  were  far 
more  in  number  than  any  of  us  had  supposed;  and 
authors  who  survived  their  earlier  fame  were  called 
back  to  mingle  with  their  younger  successors.  Once 
or  twice  the  shy  and  elusive  Herman  Melville  dropped 
in  for  an  hour  or  two.  Indeed,  it  was  one  of  the 
chief  advantages  of  the  new  club  that  it  permitted 
the  conscripts  of  authorship  to  associate  with  the 
veterans  of  the  calling.  Not  a  few  of  the  men  of 
letters  domiciled  in  other  parts  of  the  country  ac- 
cepted non-resident  membership  and  intermittently 
took  part  in  our  gatherings. 

Of  course,  we  were  prone  to  talk  shop  at  our  fort- 
nightly reunions,  and  to  break  into  little  groups  to 
exchange  experiences.  Authors  and  editors  met  in- 
formally as  fellow-members  and  they  welcomed  now 
and  again  the  publishers,  even  making  them  members 
when  they  happened  to  have  written  a  book  or  two. 


222  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Two  of  the  anecdotes  told  to  me  at  one  or  another 
of  these  earlier  gatherings  recur  to  me  now  as  I  am 
jotting  down  these  recollections.  Who  it  was  that 
imparted  the  first  of  them  I  do  not  now  remember, 
tho  the  story  itself  has  clung  to  my  memory.  It 
related  to  the  earlier  days  of  Scribner's  Monthly 
and  to  Charles  Kingsley's  brief  stay  in  New  York. 
To  meet  the  British  visitor  Dr.  J.  G.  Holland  in- 
vited every  one  who  had  ever  contributed  to  Scrib- 
ner's.  One  of  these  invitations  went  to  an  elderly 
maiden  lady  in  a  remote  New  England  village,  a  few 
of  her  unpretending  lyrics  having  been  printed 
once  upon  a  time  in  the  pages  of  the  magazine. 
She  held  it  a  duty  to  accept  the  editorial  command; 
and  she  made  her  first  trip  to  the  metropolis.  Of 
course,  she  knew  no  one  of  those  who  gathered  to 
do  honor  to  Kingsley;  and  she  sat  by  herself  in  a 
modest  corner.  There  she  was  spied  by  Roswell 
Smith,  the  kindly  publisher  of  the  magazine,  and  he 
had  pity  on  her  solitude  amid  the  throng.  He  intro- 
duced himself  and  told  her  who  the  different  guests 
were,  delighting  her  by  enabling  her  to  see  in  the 
flesh  the  writers  she  had  met  before  only  in  print. 
Finally  he  asked  her  to  go  with  him  into  the  dining- 
room  for  a  croquette  or  an  ice  cream.  She  hesitated 
for  a  moment  and  then  confessed  frankly:  "I'd  like 
to,  but  I  don't  know  that  I  ought.  You  see,  I  have 
a  ticket  for  the  entertainment,  but  I'm  not  sure 
whether  it  includes  refreshments." 

The  other  tale  was  told  me  by  S.  S.  Conant,  only 
a  few  weeks  before  he  vanished  absolutely  from  off 
the  face  of  the  earth  without  leaving  any  clue;  and 


CONCERNING   CLUBS 

to  this  day  no  light  has  ever  been  thrown  on  the 
mystery  of  his  disappearance.  At  the  time  of  this 
last  talk  with  him  he  was  the  managing  editor  of 
Harper's  Weekly  and  he  had  only  recently  received 
from  E.  A.  Abbey  a  double-page  drawing  depicting 
the  expulsion  of  the  Quakers  from  Massachusetts. 
Conant  had  at  once  written  to  Whittier,  asking  him 
for  a  poem  to  accompany  the  picture;  and  the  Quaker 
had  declined,  explaining  that  he  had  already  treated 
the  theme  and  did  not  feel  that  he  could  add  anything 
to  what  he  had  once  said.  But  Conant  was  not  dis- 
couraged, and  when  the  drawing  was  engraved  on 
wood  he  sent  Whittier  a  proof  of  the  cut,  in  the 
hope  that  the  poet  might  be  moved  to  reconsider 
his  refusal.  Within  a  week  his  faith  was  justified, 
and  he  received  a  pair  of  sonnets  which  the  sight 
of  Abbey's  beautiful  print  had  evoked.  Accompany- 
ing them  was  a  letter  in  which  the  simple-minded 
poet  requested  two  hundred  dollars  in  payment, 
adding  that  "if  thee  cannot  give  so  much,  thee  will 
please  return  them  to  me,  as  I  can  get  that  sum 
nearer  home,"  —  meaning,  no  doubt,  from  the 
Atlantic.  The  editor  promptly  put  the  sonnets  in 
type  and  sent  a  proof  to  Whittier  with  a  check  for 
the  desired  amount.  When  the  proof  was  returned, 
Conant  found  that  Whittier  had  intercalated  a  third 
sonnet  between  the  other  two. 

"Did  you  send  him  another  hundred  dollars?"  I 
inquired,  being  always  anxious  that  the  laborer 
should  reap  his  reward. 

"No,"  responded  Conant,  smiling.  "I  thought 
he  could  ask  for  it,  if  he  expected  it." 


THESE  MANY  YEARS 


III 

One  immediate  result  of  the  founding  of  the 
Authors  Club  and  of  the  opportunity  it  afforded  us 
to  rub  elbows  and  to  develop  a  solidarity  among 
the  men  of  letters  in  New  York,  and  in  its  immedi- 
ate vicinity,  was  the  organization  of  the  American 
Copyright  League  —  which  came  to  be  known  later 
as  the  Authors  League  in  contradistinction  to  a 
corresponding  League  soon  to  be  formed  by  the 
publishers.  The  original  members  of  the  Copy- 
right League  were  all  members  of  the  Authors  Club; 
and  I  believe  that  it  was  at  the  meetings  of  the  Club 
that  the  establishment  of  the  League  was  first 
broached. 

Many  efforts  had  been  made  in  the  past  to  arouse 
public  opinion  in  behalf  of  foreign  writers,  who  were 
almost  wholly  without  any  protection  under  our 
laws;  but  these  efforts  had  been  unavailing.  The 
situation  of  our  literature  under  these  circumstances 
was  increasingly  unsatisfactory.  Not  only  were  we 
taking  without  payment  the  writings  of  British  and 
French  and  German  men  of  letters,  but  our  own  men 
of  letters  had  to  vend  their  wares  in  competition 
with  these  stolen  goods  —  which  was  most  dis- 
couraging to  the  riper  development  of  the  American 
branch  of  English  literature  and  also  most  unsettling 
to  the  book-trade,  upon  which  the  expansion  of 
literature  is  nowadays  necessarily  dependent.  And 
the  American  authors  had  another  grievous  disability, 
since  it  was  unfair  to  expect  that  foreign  nations 


CONCERNING  CLUBS  225 

would  be  generous  enough  to  extend  the  full  protec- 
tion of  their  legislation  to  Americans  so  long  as  we 
refused  any  protection  to  their  own  writers. 

The  first  meeting  of  the  American  Copyright 
League  was  held  at  my  house,  121  East  18th  Street, 
on  April  16,  1883.  The  first  of  the  authors  to 
arrive  was  Henry  James,  whom  I  had  then  the 
pleasure  of  meeting  for  the  first  time.  The  second 
meeting  took  place  a  little  later  at  Button's;  and 
in  a  few  weeks  we  had  collected  adherents  all  over 
the  country.  We  organized  for  a  long  campaign, 
resolved  not  to  quit  until  we  had  accomplished  our 
purpose;  in  fact,  as  a  matter  of  record  it  may  be 
set  down  here  that  it  was  more  than  eight  years 
before  we  could  rejoice  over  the  passage  of  the  first 
act  recognizing  the  obligation  of  the  American 
people  toward  the  foreign  men  of  letters  who  were 
amusing  and  enlightening  us.  Our  ultimate  victory 
was  due  largely  to  the  zeal  and  the  tact  of  our 
successive  secretaries,  George  Parsons  Lathrop, 
Henry  Loomis  Nelson,  and  Robert  Underwood  John- 
son. It  was  due  also  to  the  invaluable  assistance  of 
our  allies  among  publishers. 

We  chose  a  strong  and  energetic  executive  com- 
mittee, and  James  Russell  Lowell  accepted  the 
presidency,  contributing  the  quatrain  which  we 
adopted  as  our  motto: 


In  vain  we  call  old  notions  fudge, 

And  bend  our  conscience  to  our  dealing; 

The  ten  commandments  will  not  budge 
And  stealing  will  continue  stealing. 


226  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Hutton  and  I  were  both  members  of  the  executive 
committee;  and  I  was  soon  made  chairman  of  a 
subcommittee  on  publicity.  For  several  months 
I  had  to  provide  for  a  syndicate  of  friendly  news- 
papers a  daily  paragraph,  calculated  to  arouse  the  in- 
terest of  the  unthinking  public  in  our  cause.  These 
paragraphs  were  extracted  from  the  addresses  and 
the  articles  and  the  letters  of  our  supporters;  and 
they  tended  to  arouse  a  current  of  interest  in  our 
behalf  among  those  who  had  hitherto  paid  no  atten- 
tion to  the  subject. 

It  was  the  experience  gained  in  this  agitation  for 
international  copyright  which  first  called  my  atten- 
tion to  the  fact  that  in  advocacy  of  any  movement 
in  advance  there  is  no  need  to  waste  time  in  contro- 
versy with  its  antagonists.  A  determined  opponent 
who  has  once  begun  to  argue  on  his  own  side  can 
never  be  converted.  Of  course,  his  arguments  must 
be  met  and  answered,  but  with  no  hope  of  affecting 
his  views;  and  this  response  must  be  as  brief  as  may 
be.  It  is  to  the  public  at  large  that  all  argument 
must  be  addressed  —  the  public  which  may  be 
assumed  to  know  nothing  at  all  about  the  facts  of 
the  case  and  to  care  less.  This  immense  majority 
is  never  hostile;  it  is  only  totally  ignorant  of  the 
situation  and  profoundly  uninterested.  And  since 
the  public  is  without  knowledge,  argument  is  not 
needed  so  much  as  information.  Once  put  the  aver- 
age man  in  possession  of  the  facts,  and  these  facts 
speak  for  themselves;  they  will  convert  him,  if  he 
will  only  pause  long  enough  to  take  them  in.  He 
pays  little  attention  to  protracted  discussion  be- 


CONCERNING   CLUBS  227 

tween  those  in  favor  of  a  reform  and  those  opposed 
to  it;  and  he  is  inclined  to  smile  at  their  vehemence. 
But  catch  him  off  his  guard  and  appeal  to  his  com- 
mon sense  by  an  understatement  of  the  situation  and 
he  soon  sees  for  himself  the  necessity  of  the  action 
urged.  In  fact,  if  the  situation  can  be  understated 
so  moderately  that  he  is  tempted  to  restate  it  him- 
self more  effectively,  then  he  is  already  won  over, 
and  he  can  be  relied  on  to  go  forth  and  make  con- 
verts to  the  cause  he  has  unwittingly  made  his  own. 
As  chairman  of  the  committee  on  publicity  I 
wrote  several  appeals  to  the  average  man,  always 
avoiding  vehemence  and  violence  and  always  striv- 
ing to  supply  information  which  the  mind  of  the 
average  man  could  readily  apprehend  and  upon 
which  it  could  react.  Three  of  these  contributions 
of  mine  may  be  mentioned  here.  The  last  of  them 
was  a  perfectly  colorless  account  of  the  slow  evolu- 
tions of  copyright,  national  and  international,  from 
the  first  granting  by  Venice,  shortly  after  the  inven- 
tion of  printing,  of  an  exclusive  privilege  to  one  of 
its  citizens,  protecting  for  seven  years  his  edition 
of  Cicero's  letters,  a  protection  which  could  not 
extend  beyond  the  boundaries  of  the  Venetian  repub- 
lic. In  the  legal  aspects  of  this  historical  sketch,  I 
was  aided  by  Professor  Monroe  Smith,  my  colleague 
on  the  executive  committee,  who  printed  my  paper 
in  the  Political  Science  Quarterly,  of  which  he  was 
the  editor.  When  it  appeared  I  sent  it  to  Theodore 
Roosevelt,  also  a  member  of  the  League,  and  he  gave 
it  at  once  to  Thomas  B.  Reed,  then  Speaker  of  the 
House  of  Representatives.  Reed  was  an  intimate 


228  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

friend  of  Roosevelt  and  of  Henry  Cabot  Lodge  and 
was  in  the  habit  of  chaffing  them  about  their  inter- 
est in  the  international  copyright,  which  he  care- 
lessly dismissed  as  a  fad  of  the  mugwumps.  And 
it  was  upon  Reed's  good-will  that  we  had  to  depend 
for  the  granting  of  a  day,  at  the  close  of  the  session 
of  1891,  for  the  passage  of  our  bill  in  the  House,  it 
having  already  passed  the  Senate.  My  paper  showed 
that  the  United  States  then  lagged  far  behind  all 
the  other  countries  of  the  world,  very  far  behind  the 
Latin- American  republics,  for  example;  and  my 
sole  suggestion  at  the  end  was  that  the  time  had 
come  when  we  ought  to  resume  our  former  position 
at  the  head  of  the  procession  of  nations.  This 
unadorned  statement  of  our  position  converted  Reed, 
for  the  next  morning  he  told  Roosevelt  that  we 
could  have  a  day  for  our  bill  whenever  we  wanted  it. 
The  act  was  passed;  and  on  the  1st  of  July,  1891,  we 
took  our  first  step  in  advance.  In  the  years  that 
have  followed,  the  ground  then  won  has  been  re- 
tained and  even  extended  by  successive  amendments 
to  the  law. 

Two  of  the  other  articles  I  wrote  were  revised 
and  issued  as  pamphlets  by  the  League,  'Cheap 
Books  and  Good  Books'  in  1888,  and  'American 
Authors  and  British  Pirates'  in  1889.  The  first 
of  these  was  an  analysis  of  the  plea  put  forward 
by  our  opponents  that  the  granting  of  international 
copyright  would  deprive  the  reading  public  of  the 
United  States  of  cheap  books.  I  had  no  difficulty 
in  showing  that  the  only  books  made  cheaper  by 
the  absence  of  international  copyright  were  con- 


CONCERNING   CLUBS  229 

temporary  British  novels,  forced  into  an  artificial 
circulation  by  half-a-dozen  rival  reprinters,  and  I 
pointed  out  that  this  artificial  stimulation  of  a  de- 
mand for  the  poorer  sort  of  British  fiction  was  not 
a  good  thing  in  itself.  I  collected  illustrations  to 
show  that  in  foreign  countries,  especially  in  France 
and  in  Germany,  where  there  was  no  artificially 
created  plethora  of  imported  fiction,  the  demand  for 
cheap  books  was  met  by  various  series  of  standard 
works  of  a  value  approved  by  time,  and  to  be  pro- 
cured at  a  price  even  lower  than  that  for  which  the 
borrowed  British  novels  were  to  be  had  in  the  United 
States.  I  ventured  the  prediction  that,  when  the 
flood  of  imported  and  inferior  fiction  should  be  cut 
off,  American  publishers  would  gladly  meet  the 
demand  for  cheap  books,  supplying  it  with  writings 
of  a  more  enduring  worth.  And  now  that  we  have 
had  international  copyright  for  a  quarter  of  a  cen- 
tury and  that  the  practice  of  piracy  has  been  given 
up,  it  is  a  satisfaction  to  see  that  this  prophecy 
has  been  fulfilled  and  that  the  cheapest  books  are 
now  the  books  best  worth  having. 

I  was  moved  to  prepare  the  other  pamphlet  on 
'American  Authors  and  British  Pirates'  by  my 
disgust  at  the  assertion  often  made  by  our  own  sup- 
porters that  the  book-piracy  was  our  national  sin, 
with  the  implication  that  it  was  a  sin  from  which 
other  peoples  were  free.  This  assertion  also  ap- 
peared frequently  in  the  British  papers,  our  kin 
across  the  sea  —  a  little  more  than  kin  and  less 
than  kind  —  being  so  acutely  conscious  of  the  beam 
in  our  eye  that  they  were  serenely  unconscious  of 


230  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

the  mote  in  their  own.  It  is  a  fact,  of  course,  that 
far  more  British  books  were  pirated  in  America  than 
American  books  in  England;  but  this  was  largely 
because  there  were  far  more  British  books  than  there 
were  American.  I  found  it  easy  enough  to  show  that 
several  London  publishers  made  a  practice  of  pirat- 
ing every  American  book  likely  to  appeal  to  their 
constituency  —  'Uncle  Tom's  Cabin/  'Ben  Hur,' 
Miss  Alcott's  juvenile  tales  and  the  varied  writings 
of  our  laughing  philosophers,  Artemus  Ward,  Josh 
Billings,  and  Mark  Twain.  And  altho  there  was 
less  piracy  in  England,  what  there  was  had  offensive 
features  rarely  observable  in  American  reprints  of 
British  books,  for  the  British  pirates  were  sometimes 
moved  to  mutilate  their  spoil  in  an  effort  to  accom- 
modate it  to  insular  taste. 

It  is  only  fair,  however,  to  note  that  the  British 
law  was  a  little  better  than  ours,  since  it  did  afford 
occasional  protection  to  certain  American  writers; 
that  is  to  say,  if  one  of  our  better-known  men  of 
letters  could  arrange  for  simultaneous  publication 
in  London  and  in  New  York,  and  if  he  could  manage 
to  be  under  the  British  flag  on  the  day  of  issue,  in 
Canada  or  in  Bermuda,  then  he  was  secure  from 
piracy  in  the  British  Empire.  But,  of  course,  this 
device,  besides  being  expensive  and  troublesome, 
protected  only  the  writer  of  recognized  popularity 
who  could  make  sure  of  simultaneous  publication; 
and  it  left  without  any  protection  an  author's  first 
successful  book  —  'Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,'  for  example, 
or  the  'Innocents  Abroad.' 

Yet  because  it  did  protect  the  writer  of  ascer- 


CONCERNING  CLUBS  231 

tained  position,  Mark  Twain  was  perfectly  satis- 
fied with  it;  and  when  my  paper  on  'American 
Authors  and  British  Pirates'  originally  appeared 
in  the  New  Princeton  Review,  Mark  fell  foul  of  it  at 
once  in  a  very  characteristic  and  very  amusing  letter. 
In  my  rejoinder  I  admitted  that,  altho  the  British 
law  protected  him  with  his  international  fame,  it 
left  the  novice  absolutely  without  any  control  over 
his  own  work.  In  this  reply  I  was  studiously 
courteous,  refraining  from  any  retort  in  kind  to 
Mark's  humorous  personalities.  Nevertheless  Mark 
took  offense  and  for  a  year  or  two  he  seemed  to 
avoid  me.  Like  most  humorists,  he  was  inclined 
to  take  himself  seriously  and  to  be  more  or  less 
deficient  in  the  negative  sense-of -humor  which  often 
fails  to  accompany  the  more  positive  humor. 

IV 

For  Scribner's  Monthly  I  had  prepared  a  paper 
on  the  'Actors  and  Actresses  of  New  York,'  for 
which  most  of  the  illustrations  were  drawn  by  E.  A. 
Abbey,  with  whom  I  soon  formed  a  friendship. 
With  his  customary  kindness  he  offered  to  design  a 
book-plate  for  me,  if  I  could  supply  an  idea  for  his 
pictorial  treatment.  I  suggested  that  as  I  was 
an  American  interested  in  the  drama  he  might 
portray  an  Indian  gazing  at  a  Greek  comic  mask. 
Abbey  accepted  this  at  once  as  a  promising  motive. 
"But  where  can  I  get  a  Greek  mask?"  he  inquired. 
I  lifted  up  my  cuff  and  showed  him  one  of  a  pair  of 
gold  sleeve-buttons,  in  the  shape  of  a  comic  and 


232  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

a  tragic  mask  —  adornments  which  I  had  bought 
from  a  Parisian  jeweler  three  days  after  the  battle 
of  Sedan.  A  few  days  later  when  he  handed  me  his 
charming  design,  I  inquired  in  my  turn:  "But  where 
did  you  get  your  Indian?"  And  he  answered:  "I 
posed  an  Irishman  for  that.  You  know,  Irishmen 
make  thundering  good  Indians."  Then  he  demanded 
an  appropriate  motto  to  encircle  his  drawing;  and  I 
took  down  my  Moliere,  finding  at  last  in  the  '  Critique 
de  FEcole  des  Femmes'  a  line  which  seemed  like  a 
prophetic  anticipation  of  the  design:  "What  do 
you  think  of  this  comedy?"  ("Que  pensez-vous  de 
cette  comedief") 

Either  thru  Abbey  or  thru  Hutton  I  got  acquainted 
about  this  time  with  Francis  D.  Millet  and  with 
Lawrence  Barrett;  and  we  four  came  in  time  to 
discuss  the  starting  of  an  informal  club,  to  consist 
of  practitioners  of  the  allied  arts,  writers,  painters, 
actors,  who  could  dine  or  sup  or  lunch  together 
intermittently,  in  New  York  in  the  winter,  and  in 
London  in  the  summer,  when  we  might  happen  to 
meet  on  the  far  side  of  the  Atlantic.  To  make  a 
start,  I  invited  Abbey,  Barrett,  Hutton,  Millet  and 
W.  M.  Laffan  to  dine  with  me  at  the  Florence 
House,  then  on  the  corner  of  Fourth  Avenue  and 
18th  Street.  This  was  on  April  3,  1882;  and  we 
then  and  there  decided  to  call  ourselves  The  Kins- 
men. 

It  was  not  until  a  year  later  that  we  met  again  at 
dinner  (in  March,  1883)  at  Hutton's,  when  we  wel- 
comed to  our  ranks  Bunner  and  James  R.  Osgood, 
Vedder  and  Mark  Twain.  In  the  summer  of  1883, 


CONCERNING   CLUBS  233 

we  had  a  third  meeting  in  London,  at  which  we  ad- 
mitted George  H.  Bough  ton  and  Clarence  King,  and 
also  half-a-dozen  of  our  British  friends,  Andrew 
Lang  and  Austin  Dobson,  Comyns  Carr  and  Edmund 
Gosse,  Alfred  Parsons  and  Linley  Sambourne;  and 
for  the  bill-of-fare  Abbey  sketched  a  plate  repre- 
senting Brother  Jonathan  shaking  hands  with  John 
Bull.  (One  of  our  later  London  bills-of-fare,  I 
may  here  note,  had  for  its  head-piece  a  composite 
pen-and-ink  sketch  by  Abbey,  Boughton,  Parsons 
and  Sambourne.)  In  the  fall  of  that  year  another 
gathering  took  place  at  the  Shakspere  Inn  at  Strat- 
ford; and  then  William  Black  was  adjoined  to  us; 
and  in  New  York  a  month  later  we  had  a  luncheon 
to  admit  Joseph  Jefferson  and  Henry  Irving,  Richard 
Watson  Gilder  and  George  Parsons  Lathrop.  There- 
after, sometimes  in  London  and  sometimes  in  New 
York,  we  met  at  irregular  intervals,  slowly  swelling 
our  American  membership  by  the  admission  of  Wil- 
liam Dean  Howells,  R.  Swain  Gifford,  John  Ames 
Mitchell,  Charles  Dudley  Warner,  and  Thomas 
Bailey  Aldrich.  Unfortunately  there  was  an  un- 
pleasant misunderstanding  in  connection  with  a 
New  York  dinner  in  1887;  and  as  a  result  of  this 
the  American  branch  of  The  Kinsmen  never  had  an- 
other meeting. 

There  was  no  dissolution,  but  its  members  lost 
their  interest  in  the  club  and  it  simply  ceased  to  be. 
When  the  American  members  chanced  to  be  in  Lon- 
don they  foregathered  with  the  British  members; 
and  to  this  day  the  British  branch  is  still  flourishing 
after  an  existence  of  more  than  thirty  years.  It 


234  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

recognizes  its  American  origin  by  making  the  Ameri- 
can Ambassador  an  ex-officio  member,  and  by  send- 
ing over  its  signed  bills-of-fare  to  the  sole  sur- 
vivor of  its  six  founders.  It  is  pleasant  for  that 
survivor  here  to  express  his  belief  that  our  modest 
international  organization  may  have  done  its  share 
in  cultivating  a  better  understanding  between  the 
exponents  of  the  kindred  arts  in  the  two  branches 
of  the  English-speaking  peoples.  No  more  con- 
genial body  of  men  ever  came  together  in  London 
or  in  New  York;  and  the  memory  of  our  meetings 
is  a  permanent  possession. 

Especially  pleasant  to  me  is  the  fact  that  the 
founding  of  The  Kinsmen  consolidated  my  friend- 
ship with  Frank  Millet,  a  man  of  varied  accomplish- 
ments and  of  unfailing  attractiveness.  A  drummer 
boy  in  the  Civil  War,  a  correspondent  decorated  by 
the  Czar  for  bravery  under  fire,  a  writer  of  short- 
stories  of  weird  ingenuity  (witness  'Yatil'  and  the 
'Fourth  Waits'),  a  painter  of  high  ambition,  an 
administrator  of  admirable  sagacity,  he  was  always 
simple,  unaffected,  friendly,  and  C9mpanionable.  Of 
him  it  could  truly  be  said  that  "none  knew  him  but 
to  love  him,  none  named  him  but  to  praise."  He 
had  solidity  of  character,  cheerfulness  and  courage; 
and  when  his  friends  first  had  news  of  the  disaster 
of  the  Titanic  they  never  doubted  that  so  long  as 
there  was  one  woman  or  one  child  in  danger,  Frank 
Millet  would  go  down  with  the  ship. 

His  immense  experience  in  all  parts  of  the  world, 
his  unflagging  interest  in  Me,  his  felicity  of  speech, 
made  him  welcome  in  any  circle.  Altho  he  was  in 


CONCERNING  CLUBS  235 

no  way  a  professed  wit,  his  conversation  was  a  con- 
stant delight;  and  yet  when  I  try  to  recapture  some 
stray  fragments  of  it  I  find  that  all  that  I  can  clutch 
is  only  one  insignificant  specimen.  And  I  am  not 
sure  that  the  amusing  gibe  I  am  about  to  quote  was 
of  his  own  invention.  After  he  had  been  elected  an 
associate  of  the  Royal  Academy  of  Art  in  London, 
being  already  a  full  member  of  the  National  Academy 
of  Design  in  New  York,  I  congratulated  him  on 
having  two  more  letters  to  tag  after  his  name. 

He  laughed  his  contagious  laugh  and  answered: 
"Don't  you  know  the  real  meaning  of  those  mystic 
letters?  N.A.  stands  for  No  Artist;  A.N.A.  stands 
for  Almost  No  Artist;  and  P.N.A.  is  Probably  No 
Artist.  So  R.A.  means  'Retched  Artist;  A.R.A. 
means  Awfully  'Retched  Artist;  and  P.R.A.  is  Per- 
fectly 'Retched  Artist." 


Another  club  which,  like  The  Kinsmen  of  New 
York,  has  gone  out  of  existence,  but  which  for  nearly 
ten  years  had  a  recognized  position,  was  the  Nine- 
teenth Century  Club,  founded  in  the  early  eighties 
by  Courtlandt  Palmer  on  the  model  of  the  Round 
Table,  over  which  Thomas  Wentworth  Higginson 
then  presided  in  Boston.  In  its  turn  it  served  as 
the  model  of  the  still-surviving  Contemporary  Club 
of  Philadelphia,  and  the  Twentieth  Century  Club  of 
Chicago.  For  the  first  years  of  its  existence,  and, 
in  fact,  as  long  as  its  founder  lived,  it  met  in  his 
spacious  house  in  Gramercy  Park,  117  East  21st 


236  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Street.  There  was  either  an  "orator  of  the  day," 
whose  position  was  combated  by  two  or  three  other 
speakers,  or  there  was  a  debate  between  two  repre- 
sentations of  opposing  views  upon  some  question  of 
immediate  interest.  I  find  that  I  have  preserved 
Courtlandt  Palmer's  note,  informing  me  that  Julian 
Hawthorne  would  read  a  paper  on  the  'Novel,' 
on  the  evening  of  March  20,  1883,  and  that  he 
hoped  I  would  say  a  few  words  of  comment  upon  it. 
I  accepted  the  invitation;  and  I  managed  to  say 
the  few  words  without  disclosing  unduly  the  trepida- 
tion caused  by  the  unwonted  effort  to  talk  on  my 
feet. 

A  month  later  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  came  on 
from  Boston  to  deliver  an  address  on  Emerson, 
which  he  incorporated  later  in  his  biography  for  the 
*  American  Men  of  Letters'  series.  His  commingled 
humor  and  good  humor,  his  sparrow-like  chirpiness, 
if  the  phrase  is  not  disrespectful,  impressed  me  as 
not  altogether  congruous  with  his  serious  considera- 
tion of  our  most  stimulating  philosopher.  In  the 
course  of  the  next  two  or  three  years  I  heard  another 
philosopher,  President  McCosh  of  Princeton,  join 
issue  with  President  Eliot  of  Harvard  over  the  elec- 
tive system  adopted  in  New  England  and  rejected 
in  New  Jersey.  Dr.  Eliot  opened  the  debate,  stating 
his  case  and  answering  in  advance  the  objections 
which  might  be  urged  against  it;  and  Dr.  McCosh 
followed  him,  simply  restating  these  objections  with- 
out attention  to  the  answers  which  his  opponent  had 
already  made.  Dr.  Eliot  summed  up,  reiterating 
his  position  and  again  demolishing  the  objections. 


CONCERNING   CLUBS  237 

Then  Dr.  McCosh  arose  unexpectedly  to  express  his 
hope  that  the  debate  might  be  published,  evidently 
wholly  unaware  that,  whatever  might  be  the  merits 
of  the  question  itself,  there  could  be  no  doubt  as 
to  the  merits  of  the  debate  —  a  most  remarkable 
exhibition  of  innocent  complacency. 

The  Nineteenth  Century  Club  had  a  president 
and  also  a  dozen  or  a  score  of  vice-presidents,  of 
whom  I  soon  became  one.  Its  first  secretary  was 
George  W.  Wickersham  (afterward  attorney-gen- 
eral of  the  United  States);  and  its  second  secretary 
was  William  Travers  Jerome  (afterward  district 
attorney  of  New  York  City).  When  Courtlandt 
Palmer  died  he  was  succeeded  as  president  by  Daniel 
Greenleaf  Thompson;  and  after  his  death,  I  became 
the  third  president  of  the  club,  holding  the  position 
for  two  years.  During  Thompson's  presidency  and 
during  mine,  the  meetings  were  held  in  hired  halls, 
at  first  in  the  spacious  galleries  of  the  American 
Artists  Association,  and  later  in  the  concert-hall 
of  the  Madison  Square  Garden;  and  I  soon  began 
to  be  aware  that  the  club  had  lost  much  of  its  social 
character  when  it  had  to  abandon  the  private  house 
of  its  founder,  where  the  atmosphere  was  intimate 
and  informal,  and  when  it  was  forced  to  make  the 
best  of  a  hired  hall  wholly  without  any  friendly 
associations.  It  had  been  inspired  by  the  indefati- 
gable energy  of  Courtlandt  Palmer  himself,  and  he 
had  imparted  to  it  an  impulse  which  survived  with 
diminishing  power  thru  Thompson's  presidency  and 
mine. 

Yet  in  these  later  years  we  did  not  lack  a  long  list 


238  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

of  distinguished  speakers — Thomas  Wentworth  Hig- 
ginson,  Theodore  Roosevelt,  Bronson  Howard,  Nicho- 
las Murray  Butler,  Dion  Boucicault;  these  are  only 
a  few  names  taken  at  random  from  our  roll.  In 
fact,  I  think  that  the  most  notable  evening  of  the 
whole  career  of  the  club  was  one  of  those  which  il- 
lumined the  administration  of  the  second  president; 
and  I  have  often  regretted  that  we  did  not  then  de- 
cide to  go  out  of  existence,  expiring  in  a  glittering 
blaze  of  irradiated  glory.  This  most  remarkable 
of  all  the  meetings  of  the  Nineteenth  Century  Club 
was  held  in  the  spring  of  1889,  during  Coquelin's 
first  visit  to  the  United  States.  I  persuaded  him 
to  deliver  a  lecture  on  'Moliere  and  Shakspere/ 
in  French,  of  course;  and  we  decided  to  have  all 
the  other  speeches  in  the  tongue  of  our  Revolutionary 
allies.  Thompson  asked  me  to  preside  for  once  in 
his  stead,  and  the  two  debaters  were  Frederic  R. 
Coudert  and  General  Horace  Porter.  The  contrast 
of  the  French  which  fell  from  the  mouths  of  the  four 
successive  speakers  was  as  amusing  as  it  was  instruc- 
tive. Coquelin's  revealed  the  choice  vocabulary 
and  the  pellucid  diction  of  the  Comedie-Frangaise; 
Coudert's  had  the  old-fashioned  grace  of  the  eight- 
eenth century,  when  his  family  had  left  France; 
General  Porter's  had  the  straightforward  vigor  of 
West  Point;  and  upon  my  own  I  must  refrain  from 
commenting.  I  admit  that  I  felt  the  justice  of  an 
editorial  remark  in  one  of  the  daily  papers  the  morn- 
ing after  the  event  to  the  effect  that,  at  the  Nine- 
teenth Century  Club,  in  the  competition  in  speaking 
French,  General  Porter  and  Mr.  Brander  Matthews 


CONCERNING  CLUBS  239 

deserved  the  prize  for  application,  while  that  for 
natural  ability  must  be  awarded  to  M.  Coquelin. 

I  should  be  derelict  to  my  duty  if  I  failed  to  declare 
here  that  I  owed  to  my  long  membership  in  the 
Nineteenth  Century  Club  more  than  the  memory  of 
many  pleasant  and  profitable  evenings,  for  I  have  a 
deeper  debt  to  acknowledge.  Because  I  was  a  mem- 
ber who  might  be  called  upon  to  speak,  I  was  forced 
to  learn  how  to  speak.  In  my  undergraduate  days 
I  had  not  profited  by  the  scant  opportunities  for 
debating  in  the  Philolexian  Society  to  which  I  be- 
longed; and  in  the  law  school,  when  I  had  once 
risen  to  take  part  in  a  moot-court,  I  had  made  a 
lamentable  failure  when  my  classmates  were  success- 
ful. Therefore,  I  had  come  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  ability  to  make  an  address  was  the  gift  of  God, 
and  that  it  was  a  boon  not  divinely  bestowed  upon 
me.  I  heard  other  men  rise  to  their  feet  and  speak 
easily  and  aptly,  and  I  credited  their  achievement  to 
nature  alone,  never  suspecting  the  art  which  made 
it  possible.  I  hope  I  did  not  meanly  envy  those 
whom  I  found  in  possession  of  this  gift;  but  I  re- 
gretted keenly  that  it  had  not  been  granted  to  me. 

I  ought  to  have  known  better,  since  I  had  gained 
a  certain  facility  with  my  pen  by  dint  of  incessant 
practice,  by  taking  pains  and  sparing  no  trouble  to 
discover,  first,  what  I  thought  I  wanted  to  say  and, 
second,  how  to  say  it  clearly  and  concisely.  By 
good  luck  I  fell  in  with  the  little  paper  of  brief  but 
pregnant  hints  to  the  tyro  orator  which  Colonel 
Higginson  had  drawn  from  his  own  practice  and  his 
own  experience.  The  reading  of  that  essay  opened 


240  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

my  eyes  to  the  fact  I  had  scarcely  before  suspected  — 
that  it  is  as  much  an  art  to  speak  on  the  feet  as  it 
is  to  write  at  the  desk.  If  I  had  taught  myself 
how  to  write  I  did  not  see  why  I  could  not  in  time 
teach  myself  how  to  speak.  And  I  straightway  set 
about  the  task  of  finding  out  the  elementary  prin- 
ciples of  the  art  and  of  applying  them  as  assiduously 
as  possible.  The  few  sentences  that  I  was  able  to 
stammer  thru  the  first  time  I  rose  to  take  part  in 
the  exercises  of  the  Nineteenth  Century  were  very 
few  indeed.  I  doubt  if  I  was  on  my  feet  for  more 
than  five  or  six  minutes.  Yet,  few  as  they  were, 
and  ragged  as  they  might  be,  they  were  carefully 
prepared,  with  a  carefulness  out  of  all  proportion  to 
their  value. 

And  when  I  say  this,  I  mean  that  my  trouble  was 
out  of  all  proportion  to  the  value  to  others,  for  to 
me  my  remarks  were  inestimable,  since  they  proved 
that  if  I  chose  I  could  say  what  I  had  to  say  as 
effectively  to  a  hundred  auditors  as  I  might  say  it  to 
a  single  friend.  That  first  attempt  was  no  triumph, 
far  from  it;  but  at  least  it  was  not  blank  defeat. 
And  I  came  home  with  a  resolve  that  the  next  time  I 
had  to  address  the  club  I  would  be  at  least  as  well 
prepared  and,  if  possible,  less  hesitating  and  less 
jerky.  The  occasions  when  I  was  called  upon  were 
increasingly  frequent  until  during  my  two  years  as 
president  I  had  to  speak,  however  briefly,  two  or 
three  times  at  every  meeting.  Now  as  I  look  back 
at  my  efforts  of  more  than  thirty  years  ago  I  realize 
that  I  was  not  altogether  in  the  wrong  in  holding 
that  true  eloquence  is  the  gift  of  God,  and  that  the 


CONCERNING   CLUBS  241 

divine  boon  had  not  been  bestowed  on  me.  Not  only 
did  I  lack  the  endowment  of  the  orator,  but  I  had 
begun  far  too  late  in  life  to  overcome  the  manifold 
difficulties  of  a  marvellously  difficult  art.  Yet  I 
rejoice  that  I  persevered  until  I  had  attained  to  the 
facility  which  comes  with  practice  and  to  the  con- 
fidence which  is  supported  by  experience.  The 
appeal  of  the  spoken  word  was  never  more  potent 
than  it  is  to-day,  even  if  the  written  word  abides 
longer.  It  is  a  precious  possession  to  be  able  to 
look  your  audiences  in  the  eye  and  to  tell  them 
what  you  have  in  your  heart,  even  if  your  periods 
are  pedestrian  and  even  if  your  lips  have  never  been 
touched  with  a  coal  of  fire. 


CHAPTER  XI 
CRITICISM  AND  FICTION 


ATHO  it  seemed  more  convenient  to  con- 
centrate, in  the  preceding  chapter,  an  account 
of  the  various  organizations  with  which  I 
chanced  to  be  connected,  it  must  not  be  supposed 
that  they  unduly  distracted  my  attention  from  my 
labors  as  a  man  of  letters.  I  have  noted  that  I 
edited  two  early  American  plays  for  the  Dunlap 
Society,  and  that  I  joined  force  with  Hutton  in  1886- 
1887  in  the  editing  of  Bernard's  'Retrospections  of 
America'  and  of  the  five  volumes  devoted  to  'Actors 
and  Actresses' ;  and  from  time  to  time  I  was  respon- 
sible for  other  pieces  of  editing,  journeyman  work  of 
a  modest  kind,  even  if  not  without  its  utility.  In 
1882,  I  had  prepared  a  selection  of  the  'Poems  of 
American  Patriotism';  and  in  1886  I  made  ready 
another  anthology,  'Ballads  of  Books,'  which  was 
enriched  by  poems  written  especially  for  it  by  Bun- 
ner,  Lathrop  and  Walter  Learned  in  America,  and 
by  Austin  Dobson,  Andrew  Lang,  Edmund  Gosse, 
and  Walter  Pollock  in  England,  friends  whom  I  shall 
consider  in  my  next  chapter,  and  which  was  re- 
edited  and  enlarged  in  a  London  edition  by  Lang. 
My  vanity  compels  me  to  note  that  both  of  these 

242 


CRITICISM  AND  FICTION  243 

selections  were  pioneers  and  that  the  fields  I  was 
then  the  first  to  plow  have  been  diligently  culti- 
vated since  by  other  compilers. 

In  1884  I  edited  the  'Rivals'  and  the  'School  for 
Scandal,'  prefixing  a  biography  of  Sheridan.  And 
in  1891,  I  made  a  selection  of  Charles  Lamb's 
'Dramatic  Essays,'  with  an  introduction  wherein  I 
had  the  pleasure  of  pointing  out  that  his  unpre- 
tending farce,  'Mr.  H,'  which  had  dismally  failed  in 
London,  leaving  its  disappointed  author  greatly 
grieved  by  "the  deep  damnation  of  its  taking  off," 
had  been  continuously  successful  in  Philadelphia  — 
a  fact  which  would  have  mightily  cheered  Elia  if  it 
had  ever  come  to  his  knowledge. 

Besides  this  editing,  I  was  continuously  engaged 
in  book-reviewing  for  the  Nation  and  for  the  Critic, 
contributing  to  the  first  number  of  the  latter  in 
January,  1883.  For  the  Critic  I  continued  to  write 
during  the  whole  of  its  thirty  years  of  existence. 
It  was  edited  by  a  sister  and  a  brother  of  Richard 
Watson  Gilder;  and  so  keen  was  his  delicate  sense 
of  propriety  that  he  did  not  permit  any  one  of  his 
successive  volumes  of  verse  to  be  reviewed  in  its 
pages.  Here  his  attitude  was  in  marked  contrast 
with  that  of  those  in  control  of  other  critical  jour- 
nals for  which  I  have  written,  which  made  a  prac- 
tice of  reviewing  the  books  of  their  contributors, 
and  even  of  their  editors. 

As  I  look  back  on  my  book-reviewing  in  those 
early  years  of  comparative  inexperience,  I  cannot 
but  confess  that  not  a  little  of  it  was  tainted  by  a 
vice  only  too  common  in  the  anonymous  criticism 


244  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

of  youthful  writers.  It  was  likely  to  have  an  undue 
proportion  of  trivial  faultfinding  in  which  I  dis- 
played my  diligence  in  picking  out  all  the  petty  de- 
fects which  I  was  able  to  discover.  No  doubt,  these 
blemishes  were  all  there,  but  to  list  them  with  per- 
sistent particularity  was  to  risk  conveying  to  the 
reader  a  false  impression  of  the  merit  of  the  book 
under  review.  I  was  prone  to  show  off  the  extent 
and  the  exactness  of  my  own  information  about  the 
subject;  and  I  could  do  this  only  at  the  expense  of 
the  author.  I  had  not  then  found  out  the  under- 
lying principle  of  the  art  of  book-reviewing  —  that 
the  reviewer  ought  to  be  a  taster  for  the  benefit  of 
his  readers.  In  journalism,  daily  or  weekly,  what  is 
most  needed  is  news  about  the  contents  of  the  latest 
books,  an  honest  report  prepared  solely  for  the 
guidance  of  the  subscribers  to  the  newspaper,  with 
no  obligation  to  lecture  the  authors  of  the  volumes 
considered. 

As  Jules  Lemaltre  once  tersely  declared,  "criti- 
cism of  our  contemporaries  is  not  criticism,  it  is  con- 
versation"; and  even  if  this  may  be  considered  as 
an  overstatement  of  the  case,  it  cannot  be  dismissed 
as  a  misstatement.  In  general,  criticism  that  is 
truly  criticism  devotes  itself  to  the  works  which 
have  been  tested  by  time;  and  it  refrains  from  a 
vain  expenditure  of  its  force  upon  the  ephemeral 
books  of  the  moment  only.  But  it  is  only  with  the 
books  of  the  moment  that  journalism  has  to  deal; 
and  it  is  the  duty  of  the  book-reviewer  to  declare 
what  manner  of  book  each  of  the  volumes  may  be 
which  he  considers  in  turn,  and  to  indicate  summarily 


CRITICISM  AND  FICTION  245 

how  good  it  is  of  its  kind,  so  that  the  readers  who 
like  that  kind  of  book  will  be  guided  to  get  it,  or  to 
go  without  it.  To  say  this  is  not  to  suggest  that 
the  competent  journalist  must  abstain  from  crit- 
icism; it  is  only  to  point  out  that  his  criticism  may 
be  implicit  rather  than  explicit;  and  that  it  can  be 
most  useful  when  it  expresses  itself  in  selection  and 
in  proportion,  rather  than  in  an  effort  at""  a  final 
evaluation  almost  impossible  until  the  book  can  be 
viewed  in  a  longer  perspective. 

Another  disadvantage  of  my  reviewing  in  the 
Nation  and  the  Critic  I  came  to  feel  more  forcibly  the 
more  I  was  engaged  in  it  —  its  anonymity.  During 
twenty  or  thirty  years  I  wrote  too  many  anonymous 
reviews  for  me  now  to  be  willing  to  accept  Schopen- 
hauer's declaration  that  an  anonymous  review  is  to 
be  classed  with  an  anonymous  letter  —  a  thing  of 
which  no  gentleman  would  be  guilty.  Yet  I  came 
in  time  to  have  an  acute  distaste  for  expressing  my 
opinion  about  an  author  which  I  could  not  warrant 
with  my  signature.  Often,  it  is  true,  my  anonymity 
was  only  nominal;  and  the  veil  was  rent,  for  exam- 
ple, whenever  the  semiannual  index  of  the  Nation 
appeared.  Nor  did  I  ever  attempt  to  conceal  my 
responsibility  for  any  adverse  opinions  I  had  occa- 
sion to  express.  Often  it  is  urged  in  behalf  of  anony- 
mous reviewing  that  it  is  the  only  method  which  will 
permit  the  frank  expression  of  searching  condemna- 
tion; but  to  urge  this  is  to  condemn  anonymity, 
since  this  is  charging  that  the  reviewer  will  be 
honest  only  when  he  is  masked.  And  it  is  abun- 
dantly disproved  by  the  courage  common  in  the 


246  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

signed  reviews  which  now  appear  in  the  Dial,  the 
Educational  Review  and  the  Political  Science  Quar- 
terly. 

Altho  I  did  not  at  once  abandon  anonymous 
reviewing,  since  that  was  the  practice  of  the  papers 
for  which  I  was  writing,  I  had  my  dislike  for  it 
intensified  by  an  incident  which  occurred  in  1887, 
when  Hutton  was  editing  the  'American  Actor 
Series,'  to  which  Kate  Field  contributed  a  life  of 
Charles  Fechter.  This  was  a  pretty  good  book, 
in  spite  of  the  fact  that  she  greatly  overestimated 
the  quality  of  Fechter 's  art,  under  the  influence  of 
Dickens's  characteristically  emphatic  eulogy.  Fech- 
ter was  a  very  picturesque  actor,  and  to  this  day 
certain  of  his  highly  effective  attitudes  rise  before 
my  eyes  —  notably  that  in  the  last  act  of  £  Ruy 
Bias'  when  he  suggested  by  gesture  that  he  was 
the  headsman  about  to  execute  the  villain.  Yet 
with  all  his  picturesqueness  he  was  prosaic,  and  as 
'Hamlet'  he  stripped  the  part  of  its  poetry,  reducing 
the  play  to  its  supporting  skeleton  of  melodrama. 
His  career  in  England  and  in  America  Kate  Field 
had  handled  very  well;  but  she  entirely  misconceived 
the  position  he  had  held  in  France.  In  reviewing  her 
book  in  the  Nation,  I  had  dwelt  on  this  defect,  prob- 
ably to  show  off  my  private  knowledge  of  Parisian 
stage  history.  Still  I  think  that  my  article  was  in 
the  main  accurate;  and  I  certainly  had  no  desire  to 
be  unkind. 

I  heard  later  from  a  friend  of  hers  who  was  also  a 
friend  of  mine  that  my  review  wounded  her  griev- 
ously, and  that  she  wondered  who  could  have  been 


CRITICISM  AND  FICTION  247 

guilty  of  it.  As  it  happened,  not  long  after  it  ap- 
peared, we  dined  with  the  Stedmans,  and  I  took 
in  Kate  Field  to  dinner.  We  had  never  met  before; 
and  as  we  were  both  interested  in  the  theater  our 
talk  turned  upon  the  stage.  And,  so  our  common 
friend  informed  me  later,  she  suddenly  jumped  to 
the  conclusion  that  I  must  be  the  writer  of  the  review 
which  had  hurt  her  feelings  so  keenly.  But  by  no 
change  of  her  cordiality  toward  me  was  I  led  then 
to  suspect  this  discovery  at  the  dinner-table.  Her 
manner  remained  serene,  perhaps  more  obviously  so 
than  mine,  since  I  was  inwardly  conscious  of  the 
anonymity  of  my  review.  I  recall  that  I  regretted 
not  what  I  had  said,  but  that  it  was  not  signed  with 
my  name,  so  that  we  might  have  met  for  the  first 
time,  knowing  each  of  us  where  we  stood. 

The  year  after  the  founding  of  the  Critic  I  had  a 
brief  experience  as  a  reviewer  of  the  acted  drama. 
Henry  Holt  made  me  acquainted  with  a  young 
architect,  John  Ames  Mitchell,  recently  returned 
from  Paris  and  planning  to  start  a  new  weekly.  He 
asked  me  for  suggestions;  I  made  many;  and  when 
the  first  number  of  Life  appeared  in  the  first  week  of 
1884,  I  found  that  he  had  adopted  none  of  them. 
He  did,  however,  enlist  me  as  his  theatrical  critic; 
and  for  several  months  I  contributed  a  weekly 
article,  signed  by  a  pseudonym  I  was  then  in 
the  habit  of  using  occasionally  —  "Arthur  Penn." 
These  weekly  articles  were  cast  in  form  of  dialogs, 
supposed  to  have  taken  place  before,  during,  and 
after  the  performance  of  the  plays  I  was  reporting 
upon;  and  it  was  by  means  of  this  give-and-take 


248  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

of  conversation  that  I  managed   to  insinuate  my 
criticism  of  the  several  performances. 


II 

Dialog  I  was  also  using  about  that  time  in  the 
short-stories  that  I  was  writing,  either  alone  or  in 
collaboration.  I  had  attempted  fiction  while  I  was 
still  in  the  law  school;  and  a  crudely  sensational 
serial  of  mine  had  seen  the  light  in  one  of  the  many 
weekly  papers  which  issued  in  the  seventies  and 
eighties  from  the  publishing  house  of  Frank  Leslie. 
Fortunately  this  weekly  circulated  only  among  the 
non-literary;  and  this  sin  of  my  youth  has  never 
been  brought  up  against  me.  It  is  now  nearly  two- 
score  years  since  I  have  seen  it  and  I  do  not  recall 
any  of  its  incidents,  but  I  suppose  I  must  have 
modelled  it  more  or  less  upon  the  Dime  Novels 
with  which  Beadle  had  delighted  my  boyhood. 

In  the  first  stories  I  wrote  after  I  had  begun  to 
contribute  to  the  better  magazines  there  is  no  trace 
of  my  earlier  sensational  strivings,  for  my  model 
was  then  the  ingeniously  invented  tale  of  Thomas 
Bailey  Aldrich,  with  an  amusing  twist  of  surprise 
at  the  end  of  it;  and  a  little  later  still  I  came  under 
the  influence  of  the  less  artificial  cleverness  of 
Ludovic  Halevy.  When  Bunner  and  I  became 
intimate  we  had  never-ending  discussions  over  our 
favorite  story-tellers;  and  I  discovered  that  he  ad- 
mired the  dexterity  of  Aldrich  as  much  as  I  did  — 
altho  I  doubt  if  mere  dexterity  was  ever  as  satisfy- 
ing to  him  at  any  time  as  it  was  to  me  then. 


CRITICISM  AND  FICTION  249 

One  day  in  the  spring  of  1879,  when  we  had  been 
analyzing  the  device  whereby  Aldrich  had  achieved 
the  reader's  complete  acceptance  of  the  non-existent 
heroine  of  his  ever  delightful  'Margery  Daw,'  which 
remains  one  of  the  masterpieces  of  the  short-story, 
we  both  expressed  our  regret  that  the  interchange  of 
letters  and  of  telegrams  had  not  been  kept  up  to 
the  end  of  the  tale,  of  which  the  final  page  or  two 
Aldrich  had  more  tamely  treated  as  plain  narra- 
tive. We  agreed  that  the  epistolary  form  might 
have  been  preserved  thruout;  and  then  one  or  the 
other  of  us  suggested  that  since  Aldrich  had  car- 
ried on  his  story  by  commingling  letters  and  tele- 
grams, it  might  be  amusing  to  eschew  narrative 
altogether,  and  to  construct  a  coherent  series  of 
events  to  be  revealed  to  the  reader  by  means  of 
letters  and  telegrams  mixed  up  with  all  sorts  of  other 
things,  newspaper  paragraphs,  advertisements,  play- 
bills, pawn-tickets,  and  so  forth. 

We  set  to  work  at  once  and  in  a  few  days  we  con- 
cocted a  story  which  we  called  the  'Documents  in 
the  Case.'  At  first  we  had  intended  to  manufacture 
twoscore  items  less  one  so  that  we  might  entitle 
our  fragmentary  narrative  the  'Thirty-nine  Articles/ 
but  we  soon  relinquished  this  irreverent  name. 
When  our  story  was  printed  in  Scribner's  Monthly 
the  novelty  of  its  form  attracted  attention;  and  we 
were  amused  to  see  that  our  framework  was  bor- 
rowed by  half-a-dozen  other  story-tellers  in  the 
course  of  the  next  few  months. 

This  was  in  1879;  and  it  was  then  that  Emile 
Zola  was  shouldering  himself  to  the  front  in  France, 


250  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

frequently  putting  forth  critical  papers  wherein  he 
proclaimed  the  need  for  a  new  departure  in  fiction 
in  accord  with  the  principles  of  "Naturalism," 
which  prescribed  that  the  novelist  should  avail 
himself  abundantly  of  "human  documents."  Every 
new  movement  in  art  has  always  insisted  on  the 
necessity  of  returning  to  "Nature,"  a  chameleon- 
word  changing  color  with  every  gaze  that  rests  on 
it.  Bunner  and  I  knew  that  our  'Documents  in 
the  Case,'  a  most  artificially  contrived  story,  owing 
its  sole  merit  not  to  its  veracity  but  to  its  novelty 
of  construction,  had  nothing  in  common  with  the 
"human  documents"  for  the  employment  of  which 
Zola  was  pleading  passionately.  But  this  knowledge 
did  not  deter  us  from  sending  it  to  him,  accompanied 
by  a  letter  in  which,  with  the  calm  impudence  of 
irresponsible  youth,  we  called  his  sympathetic  atten- 
tion to  our  use  of  documents.  Our  missive  was 
written  in  our  best  French;  and  we  promptly 
received  a  reply  to  it  —  a  reply  addressed  to  "Mes- 
sieurs Brander  et  Bunner,  au  journal  Puck,  21  et 
22  Warren-Street,  New  York."  This  response  was 
brief  and  characteristic;  and  I  venture  to  translate 
it  in  full: 

MEDAN,  19  "  Sept.,  1879. 
MESSIEURS: 

I  have  not  received  the  American  magazine  of  which 
you  speak.  And  if  I  had  received  it,  I  could  not  have 
read  you,  for,  alas !  I  am  ignorant  of  English.  I  am 
none  the  less  touched  by  the  sympathy  which  you  have 
kindly  testified  to  me;  and  I  am  very  happy  to  learn 
that  my  ideas — which  are  in  fact  only  the  ideas  of  every 
intelligent  man  of  my  age — are  finding  an  echo  in  America. 


CRITICISM  AND  FICTION  251 

There  is  a  rising  in  mass  of  all  those  who  desire  truth 
and  justice  by  the  aid  of  knowledge. 

Thank  you  again,  and  greeting  you  once  more, 

EMILE  ZOLA. 


In  collaboration  with  Bunner  I  composed  another 
short-story,  wholly  in  dialog  this  time,  entitled 
the  'Seven  Conversations  of  Dear  Jones  and  Baby 
Van  Renssellaer.'  And  in  1884,  Bunner  and  I  put 
forth  together  our  first  volume  of  fiction,  'In  Part- 
nership. Studies  in  Story-Telling,'  which  included 
the  two  tales  we  had  written  together  and  half-a- 
dozen  more,  written  by  one  or  the  other  of  us  sepa- 
rately. Collaboration  is  always  a  mystery  to  those 
who  have  not  tried  it,  and  who  can  never  under- 
stand how  two  writers  can  combine  to  tell  one 
story.  And  collaboration  is  also  often  a  mystery 
even  to  those  who  have  tried  it,  because  each  of 
them  is  frequently  unable  to  separate  his  own 
share  of  the  joint  labor  from  that  of  his  associate. 
I  find  that  I  have  preserved  the  original  list  of  the 
successive  items  which  were  to  be  our  documents; 
and  by  the  initials  pencilled  against  one  or  another 
of  these  items  I  am  reminded  that  Bunner  wrote 
the  paragraph  which  is  a  parody  of  Bret  Harte,  and 
that  I  wrote  the  letter  which  is  an  imitation  of  John 
Phoenix.  But  whether  he  or  I  was  responsible  for 
any  specific  one  of  the  others,  I  cannot  now  recall; 
and  indeed  I  feel  sure  that  we  were  both  responsible 
for  all  of  them,  since  he  may  have  suggested  an  item 
that  I  wrote,  and  I  may  have  proposed  an  item  that 
he  preferred  to  pen.  If  the  collaboration  has  been 


252  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

on  a  true  partnership,  if  it  has  resulted  in  a  chemical 
union  rather  than  a  mechanical  mixture,  there  is 
no  more  possibility  of  deciding  upon  the  authorship 
of  this  or  that  part  of  the  work  than  there  is  of  de- 
claring whether  the  father  or  the  mother  is  the  real 
parent  of  their  child. 

Collaboration  has  always  been  very  attractive  to 
me;  and  it  has  always  been  the  result  of  the  intimacy 
of  friendship  with  its  corresponding  sympathy  of 
interest.  My  collaborators  were  friends  before  we 
undertook  a  task  in  common;  and  they  remained 
my  friends  in  spite  of  the  opportunities  for  dispute 
due  to  the  partnership  itself.  It  is  a  fact  that 
the  "artistic  temperament"  is  jealous  and  touchy; 
and  this  is  probably  why  the  famous  collaborations 
of  Erckmann-Chatrian  and  of  Meilhac  and  Halevy 
were  violently  dissolved.  It  may  be  that  I  am 
lacking  in  the  "artistic  temperament,"  since  my 
varied  associations  only  cemented  the  friendships 
which  had  preceded  them. 

I  have  recorded  that  I  had  Button  for  a  partner 
in  the  editing  of  two  books  and  Bunner  in  the  writing 
of  two  short-stories.  In  other  essays  in  fiction  I 
collaborated  later  with  George  H.  Jessop,  Walter 
Harris  Pollock,  and  "F.  Anstey";  and  I  was  even 
enabled  to  publish,  in  1891,  a  volume  containing 
half-a-dozen  stories  and  entitled  'With  My  Friends. 
Tales  Told  in  Partnership.'  In  a  later  chapter, 
when  I  come  to  consider  my  essays  in  play-writing, 
I  shall  have  to  chronicle  the  same  kind  of  intimate 
association  with  Bunner,  with  Jessop,  and  finally 
with  Bronson  Howard. 


CRITICISM  AND  FICTION  253 


III 

Before  speaking  further  about  these  earlier  efforts 
in  fiction,  I  must  digress  for  a  moment  to  remark 
upon  the  signature  which  was  appended  to  them.  I 
had  been  christened  James  Brander,  after  my 
mother's  father,  and  James  was  also  the  name  of 
my  father's  father.  Yet  I  had  never  been  known  in 
the  family  by  any  other  name  than  Brander.  A 
few  —  a  very  few,  indeed  —  of  my  classmates  in 
college  had  called  me  "Jim";  but  the  majority  of 
those  who  knew  me  were  not  aware  that  I  had  a 
right  to  sign  myself  James.  In  the  title-pages  of 
my  two  or  three  earliest  books  I  had  subscribed 
myself  as  "J.  Brander  Matthews,"  altho  I  had  not 
a  little  sympathy  with  those  who  held  that  there 
was  a  smack  of  affectation  about  that  method  of 
telescoping  a  proper  name.  And  I  soon  found  that 
this  method  had  the  immediate  disadvantage  of 
lending  itself  to  an  unsatisfactory  condensation  into 
"J.  B.  Matthews."  It  seemed  to  me  that  J.  B. 
Matthews  was  but  a  feeble  trade-mark  for  a  man 
of  letters  who  had  to  vend  his  wares  in  the  open 
market.  So  I  resolved  to  drop  the  preliminary  J. 
and  thereafter  I  appeared  on  my  title-pages  simply 
Brander  Matthews,  a  name  individual  enough  to 
cling  to  the  memory  of  those  who  run  as  they  read. 

Here  I  was  following  the  example  of  Bret  Harte, 
who  had  dropped  a  preliminary  F.;  of  Bayard 
Taylor,  who  had  cancelled  a  James;  and  of  Austin 
Dob  son,  who  had  deprived  himself  of  a  Henry.  I 


254  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

found  out  later  that  John  Hay  had  likewise  manu- 
factured his  own  bold  name,  after  having  been 
matriculated  in  college  as  J.  Milton  Hay,  and  that 
Rudyard  Kipling  had  killed  off  a  preliminary  Joseph. 
It  seems  to  me  only  fair  to  allow  every  man  to  decide 
for  himself  the  name  by  which  he  desires  to  be  known; 
and  so  I  resolutely  slaughtered  the  J.  that  I  had 
inherited  from  both  of  my  grandfathers.  But  the 
scrupulous  bibliographers  refuse  me  permission  for 
this  initial  assassination ;  and  the  ghost  of  that  long- 
departed  J.  still  stalks  across  the  pages  of  catalogs. 
Moreover,  there  exist  makers  of  lists,  less  meticulous 
than  the  conscientious  bibliographers;  and  they  have 
assumed  a  non-existent  hyphen  between  the  Brander 
and  the  Matthews,  and  therefore  transfer  me  from 
under  the  M.,  where  I  belong,  to  the  B.,  where  I  am 
wholly  out  of  place. 

Most  of  the  early  short-stories  which  bore  my 
self-made  signature  appeared  in  Scribner's  Monthly, 
or  in  Harper's.  I  was  on  the  best  of  terms  with 
the  editors  of  both;  and  well  as  I  knew  them, 
and  well  as  I  supposed  I  had  ascertained  their 
respective  likings,  I  never  could  be  certain  of  accep- 
tance. For  instance,  I  had  no  doubt  whatever 
that  Gilder  would  take  a  humorous  tale  which  I 
called  the  'Rival  Ghosts';  but  he  declined  it;  and 
it  was  immediately  welcomed  warmly  by  Alden. 
To  Harper's,  as  the  more  receptive,  I  sent  my  next 
story,  'Love  at  First  Sight';  and  it  speedily  came 
back  to  me,  whereupon  I  submitted  it  to  Scribner's, 
where  it  instantly  found  a  resting-place.  To  this 
day  I  can  see  no  explanation  of  this  attitude  of  the 


CRITICISM  AND   FICTION  255 

friendly  editors.  So  far  as  I  can  see  the  'Rival 
Ghosts'  would  have  been  just  as  suitable  to  Scrib- 
ner's  as  'Love  at  First  Sight/  and  'Love  at  First 
Sight'  just  as  suitable  to  Harper's  as  the  'Rival 
Ghosts.' 

I  could  now  understand  easily  enough  why  both 
editors  should  have  refused  both  stories,  for  when  I 
read  them  over,  not  long  ago,  they  seemed  to  me 
slight  and  artificial.  They  were  "clever,"  and  they 
had  little  other  merit  than  their  cleverness.  Lest 
I  may  seem  to  be  affecting  a  false  modesty,  I  must 
add  that  I  still  find  in  my  short-stories  of  these 
'prentice  days  an  ingenuity  in  plot-making  and  a 
neatness  of  construction,  which  I  am  inclined  to 
ascribe  to  a  constant  study  of  the  deft  play-makers 
of  Paris.  These  tales  had  an  atmosphere  of  brisk- 
ness, even  if  their  apparent  brightness  did  not 
disguise  their  indisputable  lightness.  They  were, 
perhaps,  no  more  superficial  than  the  majority  of 
magazine  fictions,  altho  I  am  not  at  all  sure  of  this; 
but  they  lacked  the  sweep  of  emotion  which  touches 
the  heart  and  the  depth  of  character-delineation 
which  lingers  in  the  mind. 

I  perceive  also  that  in  those  days  I  was  more  keenly 
interested  in  the  form  than  in  the  content.  It  was 
on  the  method  rather  than  on  the  matter  that  I 
spent  my  effort.  In  the  'Documents  in  the  Case,' 
for  instance,  the  story  itself  was  relatively  unim- 
portant and  we  relied  upon  the  unhackneyed  way 
in  which  we  presented  it.  In  'One  Story  Is  Good 
till  Another  Is  Told,'  which  I  wrote  with  Jessop,  we 
simply  narrated  twice  the  same  set  of  incidents  as 


256  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

seen  thru  two  different  pairs  of  eyes.  In  the  *  Story 
of  a  Story'  I  set  down  in  succession  a  swift  glimpse 
of  the  author  who  wrote  the  tale,  of  the  editor  who 
accepted  it,  of  the  artist  who  illustrated  it,  of  the 
printer  who  set  it  up,  and  of  four  or  five  of  the 
readers  into  whose  hands  it  chanced  to  fall.  In 
6 Two  Letters'  I  employed  a  device  not  dissimilar; 
and  I  varied  this  only  a  little  in  'A  Cameo  and  a 
Pastel/  —  the  pastel  being  an  attempt  to  convey 
the  impression  made  on  me  by  a  midnight  party  at 
the  studio  of  William  M.  Chase  to  see  Carmencita 
dance,  whereas  the  cameo  set  over  against  it  was  an 
attempt  to  resuscitate  a  symposium  at  the  house 
of  Maecenas  when  he  entertained  Vergil  and  Horace 
with  two  Gaditanian  dancers.  In  all  these  essays 
in  fiction  the  frame  now  appears  to  me  to  be  more 
prominent  than  the  picture  itself. 

The  scene  of  most  of  these  short-stories  was 
generally  laid  in  New  York,  the  city  that  I  knew 
best  and  loved  best,  altho  I  was  not  then  seeking  to 
convey  its  characteristic  atmosphere.  The  period 
was  generally  the  present,  as  I  rarely  ventured  into 
an  era  other  than  my  own.  And  I  took  advantage 
of  this  uniformity  of  time  and  place  to  carry  over 
characters  from  one  story  to  another.  The  "Dear 
Jones"  and  the  "Baby  Van  Renssellaer"  whom 
Bunner  and  I  compelled  to  carry  on  'Seven  Con- 
versations' had  already  talked  to  one  another  in 
my  'Rival  Ghosts.'  It  amused  me  to  bring  forward 
prominently  in  one  narrative  persons  of  my  creating 
who  had  figured  in  subordinate  positions  in  an  earlier 
experience.  "There  is  a  fascination,"  so  Howells 


CRITICISM  AND  FICTION  257 

has  told  us,  "which  every  writer  of  fiction  will  own, 
in  recurring  to  a  type  once  studied;  but  the  novelist 
indulges  this  fancy  at  some  risk  of  wearying  his 
readers."  I  doubt  if  I  indulged  this  fancy  often 
enough  to  weary  my  readers;  and  even  if  I  did,  I 
might  now  ascribe  their  weariness  to  other  causes. 

I  carried  over  a  group  of  these  characters  from  my 
short-stories  to  a  story  long  enough  to  stand  by 
itself  in  a  volume,  long  enough,  indeed,  to  be  con- 
sidered as  a  novel.  I  can  see  now  that  the  'Last 
Meeting'  lacked  not  a  little  of  the  breadth  and  the 
depth  of  a  real  novel,  that  it  was  in  fact  only  a  short- 
story  writ  large,  and  that  it  would  have  gained  in 
effect  if  it  had  been  kept  down  to  the  dimensions 
of  a  novelet.  It  had  at  the  core  of  it  what  I  still 
believe  to  be  a  fine  romantic  idea;  and  I  am  con- 
firmed in  this  belief  by  the  fact  that  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson  shared  it. 


CHAPTER  XII 
EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES 


I  HAD  visited  London  repeatedly  in  my  youth; 
and  I  had  spent  several  weeks  there  in  1873,  on 
my  wedding  trip.  But  the  dingy  town  had  never 
appealed  to  me  as  Paris  did.  I  am  inclined  to  think 
that  this  lack  of  attraction  is  to  be  attributed  not 
so  much  to  the  contrast  of  the  gray  skies  of  the 
English  city  with  the  sparkling  sunshine  of  its  French 
rival  as  to  the  fact  that  our  family  was  likely  always 
to  find  friends  in  Paris,  whereas  we  had  few  acquain- 
tances in  London.  In  the  seventies  I  looked  upon  the 
British  metropolis  as  a  place  to  be  passed  thru 
swiftly,  while  the  French  capital  was  a  place  where 
we  could  settle  down  for  a  stay.  In  the  eighties 
these  conditions  changed;  and  as  I  came  to  have 
more  friends  in  London  than  in  Paris,  I  began  to 
abridge  my  visits  to  France  and  to  abide  longer 
and  longer  in  England.  It  was  to  Austin  Dobson 
that  I  owed  my  introduction  to  a  circle  of  literary 
men  whose  welcome  soon  made  London  rather  than 
Paris  the  goal  of  my  summer  voyaging. 

Ever  since  I  had  chanced  to  come  across  Frederick 
Locker's  'Lyra  Elegantiarum,'  —  I  think  in  1870  — 
I  had  deligjited  in  society  verse,  as  it  is  often  mis- 
called, vers  de  societe,  "familiar  verse,"  as  Cowper 

258 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         259 

termed  it,  the  brief,  brilliant,  buoyant  lyric  of  Praed 
and  Locker  and  Holmes;  and  when  I  came  into 
possession  of  Dobson's  'Proverbs  in  Porcelain,'  in 
the  spring  of  1878,  I  was  fascinated  by  the  delicate 
art  with  which  he  had  acclimated  the  foreign  ballade 
and  rondeau  and  triolet  to  our  ruder  tongue,  be- 
stowing upon  his  metrical  experiments  the  blithe 
spirit  of  English  familiar  verse.  I  reviewed  his  poems 
promptly  for  the  Nation;  and  I  prepared  a  paper 
for  Appleton's  Journal  explaining  the  principle  of 
these  fixed  forms  and  illustrating  the  theory  by  ex- 
amples taken  from  'Proverbs  in  Porcelain.'  Bunner 
shared  my  interest  in  these  novel  additions  to 
metrical  practice;  and  we  published  in  Scribner's 
Monthly  and  in  Puck  the  earliest  American  examples 
of  the  rondeau  and  the  ballade.  I  believe  that  my 
paper  in  Appleton's  on  'Varieties  of  Verse'  was  the 
pioneer  essay  introducing  the  French  forms  to  Ameri- 
can readers. 

With  his  customary  kindness,  Stedman  forwarded 
this  article  of  mine  to  Dobson,  informing  him  that 
its  author  was  going  over  to  England  that  summer; 
and  with  his  customary  kindness  Dobson  wrote 
back,  asking  Stedman  to  send  me  word  that  he  would 
be  glad  to  see  me  when  I  was  in  London.  So  it  was 
that  I  made  the  acquaintance  of  Austin  Dobson,  an 
acquaintance  that  immediately  ripened  into  a  friend- 
ship enduring  now  for  nearly  twoscore  years.  Like 
so  many  other  English  men  of  letters,  Dobson  had 
a  position  in  the  civil  service;  and  I  found  him  in  a 
remote  room  in  the  inner  recesses  of  the  group  of 
old  rambling  houses  in  Whitehall  Gardens,  behind 


260  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

the  Banqueting  House,  whence  Charles  I  went  to 
his  beheading.  The  office  in  which  Dobson  did  his 
daily  work  was  low-ceilinged  and  dim,  altho  it  had 
a  window  on  the  rear  gardens  that  stretched  down  to 
the  Thames  Embankment.  At  that  first  meeting 
he  called  my  attention  to  the  fact  that  it  was  this 
dark  and  distant  office  he  had  in  mind  when  he  penned 
his  lovely  lyric  'To  a  Greek  Girl/  in  which  he  recap- 
tured not  a  little  of  the  airy  freedom  and  the  ineffa- 
ble grace  of  the  lighter  Alexandrian  poets. 

Where'er  you  pass,  —  where'er  you  go, 
I  hear  the  pebbly  rillets  flow; 
Where'er  you  go,  —  where'er  you  pass, 
There  comes  a  gladness  on  the  grass; 
You  bring  blithe  airs  where'er  you  tread,  — 

Blithe  airs  that  blow  from  down  and  sea; 
You  wake  in  me  a  Pan  not  dead,  — 

Not  wholly  dead  !    Antonoe  ! 

In  vain,  —  in  vain  !     The  years  divide; 
Where  Thamis  rolls  a  murky  tide, 
1  sit  and  fill  my  gainful  reams, 
And  see  you  only  in  my  dreams;  — 
A  vision  like  Alcestis,  brought 

From  under-lands  of  Memory,  — 
A  dream  of  Form  in  days  of  Thought, 

A  dream,  —  a  dream,  Antonoe. 

By  a  curious  coincidence  I  had  received  from 
Bunner,  only  a  few  days  before  Dobson  quoted  to 
me  the  two  lines  I  have  here  italicized,  a  letter  in 
which  he  told  me  of  a  midnight  meeting  with  Francis 
S.  Saltus,  and  of  that  uncertain  poet's  immediate 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         261 

appreciation  of  the  exquisite  fragrance  of  this  lyric. 
Bunner  reported  that  Saltus  had  suddenly  pulled 
out  a  newspaper  clipping  with  the  remark  that 
"this  poem  contains  the  whole  spirit  of  Greece  in 
four  stanzas.  I  found  it  in  a  Baltimore  paper,  and 
I  have  written  everywhere  to  find  out  who  is  the 
author.  It  is  grand;  it  is  beautiful;  it  is  godlike. 
I  have  cried  over  it;  I  have  hugged  it;  I  have  kissed 
it !  Listen : 

With  breath  of  thyme  and  bees  that  hum, 
Across  the  grass  you  seem  to  come — " 

Then  Bunner  interrupted,  crying,  "Austin  Dob- 
son  !"  and  continuing  the  quotation, 

Across  the  years  with  nymph-like  head, 
And  wind-blown  brows  unfilleted. 

Saltus  was  delighted  to  discover  the  name  of  the 
author;  and  in  his  joy  he  read  the  poem  aloud  with 
a  trembling  voice.  And  after  telling  me  this  Bunner 
made  the  sensible  comment  that  this  perfervid  en- 
thusiasm, ridiculous  as  it  would  be  in  either  of  us, 
seemed  natural  enough  and  even  pardonable  in 
Saltus,  "that  strange  creature  of  genius." 


II 

But  it  is  Dobson  that  I  am  now  writing  about  and 
not  Saltus,  my  old  schoolfellow  at  Charlier's,  who 
had  a  gleam  of  genius  and  whose  life  was  to  flicker 
out  in  gloom  and  disappointment.  I  had  been  able 


262  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

to  go  to  the  Board  of  Trade  only  a  day  or  two  before 
I  left  London  for  New  York.  In  the  three  years 
that  intervened  before  I  went  to  Europe  again  Dob- 
son  and  I  corresponded  frequently.  I  was  able  to 
place  poems  of  his  (and  also  of  Andrew  Lang's,  sent 
me  by  Dobson)  in  the  pages  of  Scribner's  Monthly  ; 
and  at  his  request  I  was  glad  to  procure  for  his  friend 
Frederick  Locker  one  or  two  first  editions  of  Ameri- 
can authors  to  fill  vacancies  in  the  Rowfant  library. 

Then  in  1881  I  crossed  the  Atlantic  again,  arriv- 
ing in  London  more  gladly  than  ever  before,  since  I 
now  had  there  one  friend  at  least;  and  almost  imme- 
diately I  made  half-a-dozen  others.  The  Austin 
Dobsons  invited  us  out  to  Baling  to  meet  the  Ed- 
mund Gosses;  and  the  Gosses  invited  us  to  their 
very  pleasant  Sunday  afternoons,  at  the  first  of 
which  I  met  Andrew  Lang. 

From  Dobson,  Lang  had  learned  that  I  was  in- 
tending to  write  a  life  of  Moliere  —  the  biography 
which  was  not  to  appear  until  nearly  thirty  years 
later,  and  from  Dobson  I  had  learned  that  Lang 
was  also  contemplating  a  life  of  Moliere,  which  he 
had  already  outlined  in  an  article  in  the  Encyclopaedia 
Britannica,  but  which  he  was  never  to  begin.  So  far 
from  feeling  that  I  was  poaching  on  his  preserves,  he 
seized  an  early  occasion  at  this  first  meeting  to  take 
me  aside  and  to  proffer  to  me  all  the  books  he  had 
collected  for  his  own  use.  This  was  characteristic 
of  his  large-mindedness;  and  magnanimity  was 
only  one  of  the  elements  of  his  charm.  He  had  at 
first,  so  it  seemed  to  me  then,  what  I  can,  perhaps, 
best  describe  as  an  outer  crust  of  Oxford  aloofness, 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         263 

intended  for  external  use  only,  and  accompanied  by 
a  trace  of  toploftiness,  which  temporarily  concealed 
his  incessant  friendliness,  his  active  sympathy,  and 
his  constant  cordiality. 

Lang  was  the  most  versatile,  the  most  fecund,  and 
the  most  learned  man  it  was  ever  my  good  fortune 
to  know  intimately.  He  was  the  only  scholar  in  the 
narrowest  sense  of  the  word  (as  well  as  in  the  wid- 
est) who  was  able  to  combine  the  pursuit  of  scholar- 
ship with  the  practice  of  daily  and  weekly  journalism. 
When  I  first  met  him  he  was  engaged  in  writing 
a  daily  editorial  article  in  Daily  News  upon  liter- 
ary and  social  topics;  and  a  selection  of  these  has 
been  replevined  from  the  swift  oblivion  of  the  back 
numbers  in  a  volume  entitled  'Lost  Leaders.'  He 
was  printing  two  or  three  or  four  long  articles  every 
week  in  the  Saturday  Review,  besides  contributing 
unceasingly  to  other  weeklies,  to  many  monthlies, 
and  not  infrequently  to  the  quarterlies.  He  was 
ready  to  write  at  any  time  upon  any  subject;  and 
upon  almost  every  subject  he  seemed  to  have  special 
knowledge.  Even  when  he  lacked  solid  information 
his  mind  was  so  alert  and  so  keen  that  he  was  able 
swiftly  to  seize  the  essential  principles  needed  to 
formulate  a  valuable  opinion.  Of  course,  he  had 
sometimes  to  treat  topics  not  congenial;  and  I  recall 
one  paper  of  his,  on  Zola,  wherein  I  failed  to  find  his 
customary  felicity. 

Yet  these  comparative  failures  were  very  few  in- 
deed; and  he  rarely  touched  a  subject  that  he  did 
not  adorn.  His  wealth  of  learning  did  not  weight 
him  down;  and  he  wore  the  panoply  of  scholarship 


264  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

as  unconsciously  as  a  well-greaved  Greek  went  forth 
to  battle  in  full  armor.  His  erudition  did  not  debar 
him  from  lightness  of  touch;  and  he  could  be  deli- 
ciously  witty  even  when  he  was  girding  at  Max 
Miiller  and  disestablishing  the  sun-myth  theories  of 
that  Anglo-Teutonic  dogmatist.  He  was  one  of  the 
best  Grecians  in  England;  and  the  prose  translations 
of  the  Iliad,  the  Odyssey,  the  Homeric  hymns,  and 
the  Theocritan  idyls,  which  he  prepared  (either 
in  association  with  other  scholars  or  alone),  abide 
to  prove  his  possession  of  the  twofold  qualification 
which  many  other  translators  fail  to  have  —  a 
mastery  of  the  language  into  which  he  was  translating 
equal  to  the  mastery  of  the  language  out  of  which 
he  was  translating. 

He  had  as  intimate  an  acquaintance  with  old 
French  as  he  had  with  Greek;  and  his  rendering  of 
'Aucassin  and  Nicolette'  is  as  deftly  and  as  delicately 
accurate  as  his  version  of  Theocritus.  He  was  one 
of  the  foremost  folklorists  of  his  time  —  supporting 
his  own  significant  suggestions  by  a  heterogeny  of 
illustrations  derived  from  his  immense  erudition. 
No  one  of  his  contemporaries  had  a  clearer  knowl- 
edge of  the  complicated  genealogy  of  omnipresent 
myths  or  a  sounder  understanding  of  the  circum- 
stances which  brought  about  their  spontaneous 
generation,  century  after  century  in  widely  scattered 
races.  He  contributed  essential  elements  to  that 
history  of  the  totem  which  is  still  in  dispute.  And 
in  all  these  researches  into  the  barbaric  past,  and 
into  the  savage  present,  he  revealed  the  sterling 
integrity  of  the  scientific  investigator.  It  may  be 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         265 

that  he  was  at  times  a  little  annoyed  to  perceive 
that  some  of  his  fellow-scientists  were  inclined  to 
resent  the  incursion  into  an  area  they  had  pre- 
empted for  their  own  of  a  writer  who  had  won  a 
wide  reputation  in  two  other  fields  as  diametrically 
opposed  as  journalism  and  classical  scholarship. 

There  is  a  very  natural  tendency  on  the  part  of 
the  narrow  specialist,  observable  also  even  in  the 
public  at  large,  to  disbelieve  in  the  attainments 
of  any  one  who  disperses  his  activities  in  different 
directions;  and  there  is  no  doubt  that  Lang's  repu- 
tation in  each  of  the  departments  in  which  he  labored 
was  a  little  less  than  it  might  have  been  had  he  con- 
fined himself  solely  to  one  specialty.  His  fame 
suffered  from  the  fact  that  he  was,  in  the  apt  phrase 
of  Mrs.  Malaprop,  "like  Cerberus,  three  single 
gentlemen  in  one."  He  was  first  of  all  a  working 
journalist,  then  he  was  a  scholar,  abundant  in  con- 
tribution and  discovery;  and  finally  he  was  a  man 
of  letters.  Nor  is  this  a  full  statement  of  his  infinite 
variety,  for  as  a  man  of  letters  he  appeared  in  three 
guises  —  as  a  critic,  as  an  essayist,  and  as  a  poet. 
It  never  need  be  wondered  at  that  a  versatility  so 
truly  unique  should  awaken  doubts  —  doubts  natu- 
rally increased  by  Lang's  possession  of  the  dangerous 
gift  of  humor,  by  his  inability  to  be  stolidly  serious, 
by  a  tricksy  whimsicality  which  would  sometimes 
flash  across  the  pages  of  his  graver  inquiries,  lighten- 
ing scholarship  with  wit. 

The  general  reader  was  made  aware  of  his  humor 
and  his  wit  in  the  delightful  'Letters  to  Dead 
Authors,'  essays  in  epistolary  parody,  one  of  the 


266  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

minor  masterpieces  of  latter-day  English  literature, 
and  probably  the  single  volume  of  Lang's  likely  to 
survive  longest  —  playful  in  temper,  but  acute  in 
critical  appreciation.  He  had  the  fourfold  quali- 
fication of  the  genuine  critic  —  insight,  equipment, 
disinterestedness,  and  sympathy;  and  these  quali- 
fications lifted  his  indefatigable  contributions  to  the 
Saturday  Review  far  above  the  average  level  of 
journalistic  book-reviewing.  Whatever  he  did  he 
did  with  zest  and  gusto;  and  he  did  it  in  his  own 
fashion,  without  effort  to  disguise  his  own  individ- 
uality. He  told  me  once  that  he  had  been  called 
upon  to  review  anonymously  a  volume  of  the  En- 
cyclopaedia Britannica  to  which  he  had  contributed 
an  important  article,  and  that  he  fell  foul  of  his 
own  contribution  because  it  did  not  contain  certain 
facts  that  had  come  to  his  knowledge  since  he  had 
passed  it  for  press  —  to  the  natural  dissatisfaction  of 
the  editors  of  the  cyclopedia,  who  instantly  recog- 
nized Lang's  handiwork  in  the  unsigned  review. 

He  published  three  or  four  volumes  of  his  lighter 
verse  and  of  his  metrical  translations  from  the 
French  and  from  the  Greek.  His  only  long  poem, 
'Helen  of  Troy,'  never  received  the  approbation  it 
merited.  I  was  glad  to  be  able  to  arrange  for  an 
American  edition,  issued  by  Charles  Scribner's  Sons; 
and  when  he  acknowledged  the  publisher's  check, 
he  remarked  that  "they  have  generous  ideas  of  pay- 
ment, those  Scribneridse."  He  wrote  verse  as  easily 
as  he  wrote  prose,  with  an  instinct  for  the  inevitable 
word.  I  told  him  one  day  of  the  French  gibe  against 
Scribe,  who  was  asserted  to  lay.  the  scene  of  his 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         267 

plays  in  a  land  of  his  own  invention,  where  the 
manners  and  customs  and  laws  were  always  pre- 
cisely in  accord  with  the  necessities  of  his  plot. 
This  far  country  had  been  designated  as  La  Scribie. 
The  day  after  we  had  had  this  chat  I  read  in  an 
afternoon  paper  a  copy  of  verses  called  'Partant 
pour  la  Scribie,'  in  which  Lang  described  the  undis- 
covered country  as 

A  land  of  lovers  false  and  gay; 

A  land  where  people  dread  a  "curse"; 
A  land  of  letters  gone  astray, 

Or  intercepted,  which  is  worse; 
Where  weddings  false  fond  maids  betray, 

And  all  the  babes  are  changed  at  nurse. 

I  recall  one  afternoon  when  we  were  discussing 
the  ways  of  improvisers,  and  when  I  challenged 
him  to  write  a  sonnet  in  fifteen  minutes.  He  laughed 
and  asked  for  a  topic,  which  I  gave  him.  He  seized 
paper  and  pencil,  as  I  took  out  my  watch.  He 
wrote  thirteen  lines  in  thirteen  minutes;  and  then, 
with  another  laugh,  he  tore  up  what  he  had  set  down. 
On  another  occasion  I  was  telling  him  of  a  story 
which  I  was  going  to  write  (and  which  I  did  write, 
calling  it  'A  Secret  of  the  Sea'),  wherein  I  proposed 
to  have  an  ocean-liner  held  up  by  a  yacht  and  forced 
to  surrender  the  specie  it  was  carrying.  "Why 
write  about  it?"  Lang  asked  gravely.  "Wouldn't 
it  be  more  fun  to  do  it  yourself  ?  " 

He  was  a  lover  of  beautiful  books,  learned  in  the 
lore  of  bindings  and  of  collectors;  and  I  persuaded 
him  to  permit  an  American  publisher  to  make  a 


£68  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

volume  out  of  his  scattered  essays  on  these  sub- 
jects. I  collected  the  papers  and  made  it  ready  for 
the  press;  and  Lang  sent  over  a  triolet  in  which  he 
dedicated  to  me  this  volume,  entitled  'Books  and 
Bookmen' : 

You  took  my  vagrom  essays  in, 

You  found  them  shelter  over  sea,  — 

Beyond  the  Atlantic's  foam  and  din 
You  took  my  vagrom  essays  in ! 

If  any  reader  there  they  win 

To  you  he  owes  them,  not  to  me. 

You  took  my  vagrom  essays  in, 

You  found  them  shelter  over  sea. 

I  may  record  also  that  in  testimony  to  our  equal 
devotion  to  Moliere,  Lang  inscribed  to  me  the 
brilliant  'Ballade  of  Old  Plays'  in  which  he  resus- 
citated in  successive  stanzas  the  customs  of  the 
court,  the  town,  and  the  theater. 

When  these  old  plays  were  new. 

m 

Thru  the  kindness  of  Dobson  I  had  the  pleasure, 
in  1881,  of  making  the  acquaintance  of  another  of 
his  intimate  friends,  Frederick  Locker,  who  was  soon 
after  to  assume  the  name  of  Locker-Lampson.  He 
caused  me  to  be  invited  to  the  Athenaeum  Club, 
always  difficult  of  access  to  strangers;  and  at  the 
Athenaeum  he  introduced  me  one  dismal  afternoon 
to  the  dark-visaged  Abraham  Hayward,  whom  he 
persuaded  to  recite  for  us  the  ribald  and  libellous 
verses  that  Praed  had  rimed  in  dishonor  of  Lady 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         269 

Blessington  —  verses  that  Hayward  always  refused 
to  write  out,  and  that,  therefore,  perished  with  him. 
Like  Hayward,  who  was  the  author  of  the  article 
in  the  Quarterly  which  first  proclaimed  the  value  of 
*  Vanity  Fair,'  then  midway  in  its  course  of  publica- 
tion in  monthly  parts,  like  Hayward,  Locker  had 
been  a  friend  of  Thackeray's.  And  it  was  Thackeray 
who  had  said  to  Locker  when  the  latter  was  cast 
down  by  some  editor's  rejection  of  a  poem  —  "Never 
mind,  Locker,  our  verses  may  be  small  beer,  but  at 
any  rate  they  are  the  right  tap !" 

It  was  the  tap  from  which  Thackeray  had  drawn 
'Without  and  Within'  and  the  'Ballad  of  Bouilla- 
baisse,' and  from  which  Praed  drew  the  'Belle  of  the 
Ball,'  that  Locker  drew  'Piccadilly'  and  'St.  James's 
Street.'  In  the  successive  issues  of  his  'London 
Lyrics'  Locker  had  varied  the  contents,  rejecting 
earlier  lyrics  that  had  ceased  to  please  him  and 
inserting  newer  verses;  and  a  little  while  before  I 
met  him  he  had  asked  Dobson  to  go  over  his  poems 
and  to  make  a  selection  of  the  best  to  appear  as  the 
definitive  edition  of  'London  Lyrics.'  This  his 
younger  friend  had  done  with  unerring  discretion; 
and  Locker  gave  to  his  friends,  of  whom  I  was  then 
fortunately  to  be  numbered,  a  privately  printed 
volume,  for  which  Dobson,  who  was  responsible  for 
the  choice  of  its  contents,  had  provided  this  condensed 
criticism  in  verse: 


Apollo  made,  one  April  day, 
A  new  thing  in  the  riming  way; 
Its  turn  was  neat,  its  wit  was  clear, 


270  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

It  wavered  'twixt  a  smile  and  tear; 
Then  Momus  gave  a  touch  satiric, 
And  it  became  a  *  London  Lyric.' 


Locker  was  delighted  with  Dobson's  selection  of 
his  best  verses  for  this  final  book;  but  soon  his  heart 
began  to  yearn  over  the  lost  sheep,  over  the  poems 
excluded  to  all  eternity  from  paradise.  At  last  he 
resisted  no  longer  and  herded  all  the  outcasts  into 
another  privately  printed  volume  which  he  en- 
titled ' London  Rimes.'  As  he  wrote  me  once,  the 
worst  in  'London  Lyrics'  is  better  than  the  best  in 
'London  Rimes';  none  the  less  did  the  second  little 
book  go  forth  to  take  its  place  beside  the  first  on 
the  book-shelves  of  his  friends. 

Locker  had  sent  this  definitive  edition  of  the 
"Lyrics'  to  Gilder  as  well  as  to  me;  and  Gilder 
asked  me  to  write  a  critical  essay  on  Locker  for 
Scribner's  Monthly,  which  was  about  to  become  the 
Century  Magazine.  With  the  aid  of  counsel  from 
Dobson  and  from  Bunner,  I  prepared  the  paper. 
After  it  appeared,  Gilder  agreed  to  let  me  write  a 
companion  piece  on  Dobson;  and  when  next  I 
went  to  London  I  sought  counsel  of  Locker  as  the 
one  fellow-poet  most  likely  to  help  me  to  seize  the 
essential  traits  of  'Vignettes  in  Rime'  and  'Proverbs 
in  Porcelain.'  He  spent  two  or  three  hours  with  me 
going  over  Dobson's  work;  and  at  the  end  of  our 
several  meetings  I  made  a  curious  discovery.  All 
unconsciously  to  himself,  for  he  was  as  loyal  to 
Dobson  as  Dobson  was  to  him,  he  had  been  construct- 
ing a  ring-fence  around  the  restricted  domain  of 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         271 

vers  de  societe  with  himself  inside  the  inclosure 
and  with  Dobson  outside.  I  think  that  if  I  had 
then  put  to  him  in  plain  words  his  unformulated 
thought,  he  would  have  admitted  it  frankly,  explain- 
ing that  Dobson  was  too  emphatically  a  poet  for 
his  Pegasus  to  be  wholly  at  ease  in  the  narrow 
paddock  of  familiar  verse,  wherein  ample  pasturage 
might  be  found  for  half-poets  like  himself.  And  I 
perceived  that  what  Locker  did  not  say  in  so  many 
words  was  absolutely  just.  Dobson's  muse  wore 
the  flowing  robe  proper  for  climbing  the  slopes  of 
Parnassus,  and  only  on  occasion  was  she  willing  to 
appear  in  the  tailor-made  garb  of  her  sister  who 
inspired  the  lyrist  of  London. 

By  these  dark  hints  of  Locker  I  profited  when  I 
penned  my  paper;  and  I  did  not  hesitate  to  tell 
Dobson  what  Locker  had  intimated.  For  a  moment, 
altho  for  a  moment  only,  Dobson  was  taken  aback. 
Then  he  admitted  that  Locker  was  quite  right.  "I 
think  that  the  best  of  my  work  is  not  purely  familiar 
verse,"  he  admitted.  "In  fact,  I  wrote  verse  of 
that  kind  mainly  because  I  saw  that  it  provided  an 
opening  for  me  when  I  was  young  and  unknown." 

I  should  be  false  to  another  friend  if  I  failed  to 
note  here  that  Bunner's  appreciation  of  Dobson's 
art  was  as  helpful  to  me  as  Locker's.  I  find  a  letter 
of  the  time  in  which  he  sent  me  hints,  calling  the 
lines  'To  a  Greek  Girl'  the  most  purely  beautiful  of 
all  Dobson's  work,  resting  the  spirit,  if  it  did  not 
touch  the  heart.  "Most  classicism  shows  us  only 
the  white  temple,  the  clear  high  sky,  the  outward 
beauty  of  form  and  color.  This  ('To  a  Greek  Girl') 


THESE  MANY  YEARS 

gives  us  the  warm  air  of  spring;  the  life  that  pulses 
in  a  girl's  veins  like  the  soft  swelling  of  sap  in  a 
young  tree.  This  is  the  same  feeling  that  raises 
'As  You  Like  It'  above  all  pastoral  poetry.  Our 
nineteenth-century  sensibilities  are  so  played  on 
by  the  troubles,  the  sorrows,  the  little  vital  needs 
and  anxieties  of  the  world  around  us,  that  some- 
times it  does  us  good  to  get  out  into  the  woods  and 
fields  of  another  world  entirely,  if  only  the  atmosphere 
is  not  chilled  and  rarefied  by  the  lack  of  the  breath 
of  humanity." 

A  few  years  later  when  I  reprinted  the  papers  on 
Locker  and  Dobson  in  a  volume  called  'Pen  and 
Ink,  Essays  on  Subjects  of  More  or  Less  Importance,' 
I  asked  Bunner  and  Dobson  for  poems  to  go  in  the 
front  and  at  the  back  of  my  book.  They  acceded 
to  my  request;  Bunner's  epistle  in  rime  will  be 
found  at  the  end  of  my  volume;  but  when  Dobson 
gave  me  his  verses  he  expressed  a  doubt  as  to  the 
propriety  of  his  contributing  to  a  book  containing 
a  criticism  of  his  own  work.  Since  this  appeared  to 
him  to  be  a  question  of  taste,  I  could  do  no  more 
than  yield  to  his  feeling;  and  Lang  supplied  me  with 
a  prefatory  poem,  'Pen  and  Ink.'  Dobson's  lines 
may  now  appear  in  print  for  the  first  time: 

With  pen  and  ink  full  many  a  sin 

The  reckless  race  of  men  begin; 
Not  only  with  their  black  or  blue 
They  stain  the  page  of  virgin  hue; 

But  thereupon,  forsooth  must  spin 
Their  tangled  web  of  false  and  true 
With  pen  and  ink  ! 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         273 

And  worse  than  this — they  wily  grin 
To  think  how  all  their  kith  and  kin, 
Ay,  and  the  long-eared  Public,  too, 
Must  buy  these  desperate  things  they  do, 
With  pen  and  ink ! 

Space  may  also  be  found  here  for  a  briefer  effort 
of  the  playful  poet,  only  a  couplet,  that  he  inscribed 
in  a  copy  of  the  original  edition  of  Sheridan's  'Rivals,' 
published  in  1775,  which  he  sent  me,  after  an  un- 
toward delay,  due  to  the  dilatoriness  of  the  book- 
binders : 

Behold  the  long-hoped  gift  arrive:  — 
4  Old  Sherry— brand  of  Seventy-Five.' 

Before  leaving  Locker  I  must  record  two  remarks 
of  his.  He  had  a  high  regard  for  the  lighter  lyrics 
of  Holmes,  calling  him  —  in  the  preface  to  'Lyra 
Elegantiarum '  —  "perhaps  the  best  living  writer" 
of  familiar  verse.  He  paid  the  American  poet  the 
sincerest  of  compliments  by  borrowing  the  form  of 
the  'Last  Leaf  for  his  own  'To  My  Grandmother': 

This  relative  of  mine, 
Was  she  seventy-and-nine 

When  she  died  ? 
By  the  canvas  may  be  seen 
How  she  look'd  at  seventeen, 

As  a  bride. 

And  one  day  when  we  were  discussing  the  art  of 
versification  —  it  may  have  been  during  one  of 
our  long  talks  about  Dobson  —  he  drew  my  atten- 


274  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

tion  to  the  peculiarity  of  this  six-line  stanza,  declar- 
ing that  it  seemed  to  be  easy,  altho  it  was  in  fact 
very  difficult.  "In  fact,"  he  concluded,  "I  don't 
think  that  any  one,  excepting  only  Holmes  and 
myself,  has  been  really  successful  with  it." 

When  Mr.  Cobden-Sanderson  set  up  as  a  binder, 
Locker  sent  to  ask  if  he  would  cover  some  books 
for  him.  To  which  the  craftsman,  in  the  pride  of 
his  achievement,  responded  that  he  did  not  care  to 
bind  "anything  ephemeral."  Locker  suspected  that 
this  reply  was  intended  to  prevent  his  request  to 
have  his  own  'London  Lyrics'  sumptuously  pre- 
served for  posterity  in  one  of  Mr.  Cobden-Sanderson's 
magnificently  decorated  morocco  covers;  and  this 
nettled  him  a  little,  so  he  sent  word  again  that  the 
volume  he  wished  to  have  worthily  bound  was  a 
first  edition  of  Shakspere's  e Sonnets'  —  "if  Mr. 
Cobden-Sanderson  did  not  consider  that  too  ephem- 
eral." 

IV 

Dobson  and  Lang  and  Gosse  were  members  of 
the  Savile  Club,  which  had  been  founded  by  Sid- 
ney Colvin  and  which  was  then  occupying  a  house 
in  Savile  Row  —  the  same  house  in  which  Richard 
Brinsley  Sheridan  had  died,  as  the  tablet  declared 
which  the  Society  of  Arts  had  placed  on  its  front. 
One  or  another  of  my  new-found  friends  put  me  up 
at  the  Savile  during  my  successive  visits  to  London, 
until  I  was  elected  a  member,  in  1885.  A  custom  of 
the  club  made  the  path  easy  for  the  feet  of  the 
stranger  within  its  doors;  this  was  the  social  con- 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         275 

vention  that  those  who  chanced  to  sit  side  by  side 
at  luncheon  or  at  dinner  or  in  the  smoking-room 
should  feel  at  liberty  to  talk  to  one  another  without 
waiting  for  the  formality  of  introduction.  This  is  a 
sensible  club  tradition  which  makes  for  good-fellow- 
ship, as  I  soon  found  out  for  myself.  One  day  I 
dropped  in  to  lunch  and  sat  at  a  table  where  I  spied 
some  one  I  knew.  Next  to  him  sat  an  alert  little 
man  with  a  keen  face  and  sharp  eyes;  and  before 
I  had  finished  my  lunch  I  recognized  that  I  was  in 
the  presence  of  a  master  of  conversation,  a  talker 
who  could  have  held  his  own  against  John  Hay  or 
Clarence  King.  He  was  frank  and  unaffected,  yet 
he  had  an  air  of  distinction.  His  manner  was  most 
friendly  and  engaging,  and  when  our  modest  meal 
was  over,  I  followed  him  up-stairs  to  the  smoking- 
room  for  our  coffee.  As  we  took  our  seats  I  saw 
Lang  in  the  next  room,  and  I  rushed  over  to  him, 
with  an  eager  inquiry  as  to  the  name  of  the  un- 
known conversationalist.  Lang  glanced  back  and 
answered:  "That's  Jenkin  —  Fleeming  Jenkin.  He's 
a  great  authority  on  drains !" 

At  the  moment  the  name  did  not  mean  anything 
to  me;  and  I  only  wondered  how  it  was  that  a  per- 
sonality so  interesting  happened  to  be  an  authority 
on  drains.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Fleeming  Jenkin 
was  the  originator  of  the  system  of  sewage-disposal 
introduced  into  America  by  Colonel  George  E. 
Waring;  and  he  spoke  to  me  later  most  apprecia- 
tively of  the  American  engineer's  work.  But  he 
was  more  than  an  authority  on  drains,  since  he  had 
been  closely  associated  with  Lord  Kelvin  in  the 


276  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

development  of  transatlantic  telegraphing.  With 
characteristic  enjoyment  he  narrated  to  me  at  a 
subsequent  meeting,  certain  details  of  his  visit  to 
America  in  supervision  of  the  Atlantic  cables,  and 
he  dwelt  with  amusement  on  the  swiftness  with  which 
he  had  cut  short  an  effort  of  Jay  Gould  to  bribe 
him. 

At  the  time  I  met  him  he  was  engaged  in  develop- 
ing a  method  of  aerial  transportation  by  means  of 
electrical  appliances,  a  system  which  he  called  tel- 
pherage, and  in  which  he  had  as  an  associate,  a 
young  electrical  engineer,  Gordon  Wigan,  soon  also 
to  become  a  friend  of  mine.  But  it  was  not  as  a 
practical  scientist  that  Jenkin  interested  me  but  as 
an  artist  in  conversation;  and  yet  when  I  try  to 
recall  specimens  of  his  talk  my  memory  is  empty, 
and  I  think  that  this  must  be  because  he  was  not 
primarily  a  wit,  crackling  with  quips  readily  remem- 
bered. He  had  wit  in  abundance  but  he  was  no 
mere  phrase-maker;  his  wit  was  not  concentrated 
in  portable  epigram,  but  dispersed  and  generally 
illuminating.  His  was  a  wit  of  ideas  rather  than  a 
wit  of  words;  and  in  him  wit  was  less  obvious  than 
the  free  play  of  intelligence.  Once  in  the  smoking- 
room  when  a  group  of  us  were  exchanging  impres- 
sions, some  one  started  a  new  topic  and  some  one 
else  turned  to  Jenkin  and  said:  "You  ought  to  have 
a  theory  about  that." 

"Of  course,  I  ought,"  Jenkin  replied  instantly. 
"And  I'll  make  one  on  the  spot  just  to  satisfy 
you!" 

He  had  been  a  professor  at  the  University  of 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         277 

Edinburgh  when  Robert  Louis  Stevenson  was  an 
undergraduate  there;  and  as  a  consequence  of  the 
friendship  then  begun,  Stevenson  prepared  the  pref- 
atory memoir  for  the  two  volumes  of  his  literary 
and  scientific  remains.  Perhaps  because  Stevenson 
was  desperately  ill  when  he  accepted  this  unwel- 
come task  out  of  loyalty  to  his  dead  friend,  writing 
it  in  bed  and  rewriting  it  repeatedly  to  please  the 
widow  of  his  old  professor,  this  memoir  has  always 
seemed  to  me  the  least  successful  of  all  Stevenson's 
works.  It  would  be  unfair  to  describe  it  as  patroniz- 
ing; but  when  I  first  read  it  I  could  not  but  feel 
that  Jenkin  was  a  larger  figure  than  he  appeared 
in  Stevenson's  pages.  Far  better  is  the  portrait 
in  the  pair  of  papers  on  'Talk  and  Talkers'  in  which 
Jenkin  figures  as  Cockshot,  being  contrasted  with 
Gosse  and  Henley  and  R.  A.  M.  Stevenson,  all  of 
whom  I  knew,  finding  no  one  of  them  more  satis- 
factory in  conversation  than  Jenkin. 

Fleeming  Jenkin  was  one  of  the  very  few  men  I 
have  met  who  knew  anything  about  acting,  the  least 
understood  of  all  the  arts.  Now  and  again  I  have 
found  a  player  or  a  playwright  who  had  an  insight 
into  the  principles  of  this  art;  but  almost  the  only 
laymen  of  my  acquaintance  possessed  of  a  grasp  of 
histrionic  theory  were  Jenkin  and  his  associate, 
Gordon  Wigan  —  and  the  latter  had  it  by  inheri- 
tance, being  a  son  of  Alfred  Wigan.  It  was  Wigan 
who  favored  me  with  an  annihilating  criticism  of 
a  performer  of  long  service  in  the  London  theaters. 
"I  don't  deny  that  he  is  the  most  scholarly  and 
accomplished  actor  on  our  stage,"  was  Wigan's  re- 


278  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

mark;  "but  sooner  than  see  him  act  I'd  rather  be 
all  alone  by  myself  in  a  dark  room!" 

I  recall  that  I  capped  this  by  quoting  an  American 
criticism  of  an  American  actor  of  equal  prominence 
which  was  quite  as  damnatory  since  it  consisted  of 
a  single  sentence  —  "Mr.  Blank's  'Hamlet'  is  no 
way  to  behave." 

With  Wigan  I  had  a  point  of  contact  other  than 
our  common  enjoyment  of  acting;  we  were  both 
students  of  the  art  of  prestidigitation.  So  was  a 
friend  of  his  who  soon  became  a  friend  of  mine, 
Walter  Herries  Pollock,  the  brother  of  the  present 
Sir  Frederick  Pollock  and  the  son  of  the  Sir  Frederick 
Pollock  who  had  edited  Macready's  'Reminiscences.' 
When  I  made  his  acquaintance  in  the  summer  of 
1881,  Walter  Pollock  was  the  second  in  command 
in  the  editorial  office  of  the  Saturday  Review;  and 
in  our  first  talk  I  expressed  my  delight  in  a  review 
of  one  of  "Professor"  Hoffman's  manuals  of  par- 
lor-magic which  had  appeared  in  the  Saturday  a 
week  or  two  earlier.  "You  shall  meet  the  man  who 
wrote  that,"  said  Pollock;  "he  is  a  very  unusual 
man."  And  when  I  did  meet  him  I  soon  found  that 
this  was  not  the  overstatement  of  an  enthusiastic 
friend,  for  the  article  on  conjuring  had  been  written 
by  E.  H.  Palmer,  professor  of  Arabic  at  Cambridge, 
and  also  at  that  time  a  chief  leader-writer  for  the 
Standard. 

Palmer  was  an  extraordinary  creature  of  unusual 
appearance  and  of  unusual  attainments  in  out-of- 
the-way  lines;  and  it  was  fortunate  for  me  that  I 
was  able  to  make  his  acquaintance  when  I  did,  since 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         279 

the  next  summer,  when  he  was  attached  as  inter- 
preter-in-chief  to  the  English  expeditionary  forces 
in  Egypt,  he  was  sent  on  a  secret  mission  to  the 
sheiks  of  the  desert,  in  the  course  of  which  he  was 
led  into  an  ambush  and  slain.  He  and  Wigan, 
Pollock  and  I  were  all  followers  of  Robert-Houdin, 
and  we  chose  to  believe  that  as  the  original  Rosi- 
crucians  had  possibly  been  professional  conjurors, 
we  felt  ourselves  authorized  to  revive  the  Brother- 
hood. Like  all  adepts  in  modern  magic,  we  took  no 
stock  in  the  manipulations  of  professional  spiritual 
mediums;  and  as  Pollock  ascertained  that  a  dis- 
tinguished man  of  science,  also  a  member  of  the 
Savile,  had  leanings  toward  spiritualism,  he  organ- 
ized a  seance  at  his  house  with  intent  to  prove  that 
the  magicians  who  made  no  pretense  to  super- 
natural powers  could  work  marvels  quite  as  mysteri- 
ous as  those  exhibited  by  the  spiritualists. 

The  burden  of  this  enterprise  fell  upon  Palmer; 
and  about  a  dozen  of  us,  including  the  man  of 
science,  met  at  Pollock's  for  a  couple  of  hours  one 
evening.  His  house  had  on  its  main  floor  two  rooms, 
a  drawing-room  and  a  dining-room,  separated  by  a 
smaller  antechamber.  Two  of  the  manifestations 
deserve  a  detailed  record.  In  one  of  them,  an  illus- 
tration of  thought-transference,  Palmer  sat  himself 
down  at  the  dining-table  in  the  rear  room  with  his 
back  to  the  drawing-room,  in  which  Pollock  was 
seated  at  another  table,  with  his  back  to  the  dining- 
room;  and  before  each  of  them  was  a  chess-board 
with  its  complete  complement  of  men.  The  rest 
of  us  wandered  from  one  table  to  the  other,  while 


280  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Wigan  stood  in  the  antechamber  between,  to  act 
as  umpire.  With  watch  in  hand  he  called  out 
"Black  can  make  his  first  move,"  whereupon  Palmer 
pushed  forward  a  pawn.  Without  any  possibility 
of  communication  Pollock  instantly  copied  that  move 
on  the  board  before  him,  and  then  pushed  forward 
one  of  his  own  pawns,  a  move  immediately  repeated 
by  Palmer  in  the  other  room.  Then  the  umpire 
called  on  Black  to  make  a  second  move,  which  Pol- 
lock imitated,  making  his  second  move  in  response. 
And  so  the  silent  game  was  played  out  to  the  end 
with  no  interchange  of  signals  from  one  player  to 
the  other.  I  confess  that  this  mystery  might  have 
baffled  me  if  I  had  not  known  in  advance  that  the 
game  had  been  memorized  by  both  players. 

Then  Palmer  was  blindfolded  and  stationed  in 
a  far  corner  of  the  drawing-room,  while  the  rest  of 
us  gathered  in  the  dining-room  about  the  scientific 
man  who  was  to  write  a  number  which  Palmer  was 
to  divine  at  a  distance.  I  saw  the  number  written; 
it  was  666;  and  I  saw  also  that  the  prearranged 
signal  which  was  to  convey  it  to  the  blindfolded 
guesser  had  failed  to  reach  him.  While  Pollock 
and  Wigan  were  holding  the  attention  of  the  others, 
in  a  vain  effort  to  work  the  secret  system  of  com- 
munication, I  slipped  back  to  Palmer  and  whispered 
the  number  to  him.  He  gave  me  time  to  resume 
my  place  with  the  others,  who  had  not  noticed  my 
absence;  and  then  with  a  shout  he  sprang  up  and 
tore  the  handkerchief  from  his  eyes  and  rushed 
toward  us,  his  grayish  hair  bristling  as  he  came 
forward,  as  tho  under  a  potent  spell.  "What  is 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         281 

this?"  he  cried  in  awestruck  tones.  "I  do  not  see 
a  number.  What  I  behold  is  a  huge  horned  beast  — 
a  beast  with  seven  horns !" 

And  we  all  know  that  the  number  of  the  Beast 
was  six  hundred  and  sixty  and  six. 


Palmer  and  Pollock  were  equally  intimate  with 
Walter  Besant,  the  novelist,  then  the  secretary  of 
the  Palestine  Exploration  Fund;  in  fact,  they  were 
both  collaborators  of  his,  since  Pollock  and  Besant 
had  joined  forces  in  a  short  story  or  two,  and  in  an 
adaptation  of  'Gringoire,'  while  Palmer  and  Besant 
had  been  jointly  responsible  for  a  history  of  Jeru- 
salem. And  Besant  was  a  close  friend  of  Charles 
Godfrey  Leland,  the  rimer  of  the  ballads  of  "Hans 
Breitmann,"  who  was  also  a  close  friend  of  Palmer's, 
with  whom  he  used  to  patter  Romany  —  the  gipsy 
tongue  being  Leland's  specialty,  and  being  only  one 
out  of  the  many  strange  languages  that  Palmer 
had  mastered  for  the  fun  of  it.  To  Leland  was  due 
the  establishment  in  the  early  eighties  of  an  inter- 
mittent dining-club,  which  lasted  some  ten  years, 
and  which  never  quite  attained  the  power  and  pres- 
tige that  he  hoped  for  it.  This  was  the  Rabelais 
Club,  designed  to  bring  together  all  those  in  Europe 
and  America  revering  the  memory  of  the  Master, 
who  was  one  of  the  wisest  men  of  his  time  and  one 
of  the  mightiest  humorists  of  all  time. 

Lord  Hough  ton  accepted  the  presidency;  Besant 
and  Pollock  were  the  secretaries;  and  it  had  grown 


THESE  MANY  YEARS 

to  a  membership  of  perhaps  twoscore  when  either 
Besant  or  Pollock  invited  me  to  one  of  its  infrequent 
dinners.  I  think  that  this  was  in  1883,  and  the 
next  year  I  was  elected  a  member,  altho  I  expressed 
a  modest  doubt  to  Besant,  when  he  proposed  me,  as 
to  my  competence  to  pass  a  Pantagruelist  examina- 
tion. A  characteristic  smile  broadened  his  face  as 
he  explained  that  the  Rabelais  Club  admitted  mem- 
bers of  two  different  sets  of  qualifications.  "To  be 
worthy  of  acceptance,  you  must  declare  on  oath 
that  you  have  diligently  read  the  works  of  the  Mas- 
ter, or  else  you  must  make  affidavit  that  you  have 
not  read  them  faithfully.  So  long  as  you  can  make 
one  or  the  other  of  these  declarations  you  are  eligible." 
There  were  already  several  Americans  besides 
Leland  hi  the  Rabelais  when  I  joined  —  Holmes, 
Longfellow  and  Lowell,  Henry  James  and  Bret 
Harte;  and  others  were  elected  after  I  was  —  E.  A. 
Abbey,  Lawrence  Barrett,  John  Hay,  Clarence  King, 
and  Ho  wells.  Its  membership  included  a  few  art- 
ists, but  a  large  majority  were  men  of  letters,  many 
of  whom  were  scholars,  as  the  three  volumes  of  the 
'Recreations  of  the  Rabelais  Club'  amply  prove. 
These  recreations  were  the  leaflets  prepared  by 
different  members  on  different  occasions  to  place  by 
the  sides  of  the  plates  at  the  dinner-table.  Some- 
times they  were  satiric  fragments  of  lost  books  by 
the  Master;  and  sometimes  they  were  co-operative 
exhibitions  of  the  scholarly  skill  of  half-a-dozen 
members  joining  forces  for  the  occasion.  For  exam- 
ple, for  one  of  our  dinners  the  present  Sir  Frederick 
Pollock  wrote  a  brief  stanza  in  German  in  praise 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         283 

of  Beethoven's  symphonies,  which  Samuel  Lee 
turned  into  Latin,  from  which  ancient  tongue 
Besant  rendered  it  into  English  that  George  Saints- 
bury  might  put  it  into  Greek  and  Palmer  into  Arabic. 
At  another  dinner  a  single  leaflet  contained  a  couplet 
and  a  quatrain  signed  only  with  the  initial  H,  which 
concealed  Lord  Houghton,  I  think.  This  is  the 
couplet: 

God  gave  Free  Will  to  People  and  to  Prince; 
And  has  been  very  sorry  for  it  ever  since. 

And  this  is  the  quatrain: 

On  the  Twelfth  of  September,  one  Sabbath  morn, 
I  shot  a  hen-pheasant,  in  standing  corn, 
Without  a  license.     Combine  who  can 
Such  a  cluster  of  crimes  against  God  and  man. 

For  a  third  dinner  Wigan  and  Pollock  and  I  pre- 
pared a  mock  examination-paper  designed  to  test 
a  knowledge  of  the  mysteries  of  the  show-business 
in  all  its  branches,  opera  and  melodrama,  con- 
juring and  acrobatics;  and  I  doubt  if  any  one  of 
the  three  members  of  the  revived  Rosicrucian 
Brotherhood  could  have  passed  it,  while  the  rest  of 
the  Rabelaisians  must  have  been  surprised  to  dis- 
cover that  so  many  mysterious  questions  could  be 
asked  about  objects  unknown.  That  the  test  was 
rather  stiff  may  be  gaged  from  these  sample  queries: 

1.  What  is  a  tranko? 

2.  Distinguish  between  a  star  and  a  vampire.     What  is 

the  French  name  of  the  latter,  and  why? 


284  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

11.  Describe  the  act  known  as  the  'Courier  of  St.  Peters- 
burg' in  not  more  than  twenty  lines.  Explain 
the  name. 

13.  What  is  a  battoute?  Describe  the  Barnum  method 
of  using  it  in  connection  with  elephants. 

15.  'Pete  Jenkins.'     Explain  this  name. 

When  it  was  announced  that  Oliver  Wendell 
Holmes  was  going  to  make  his  second  visit  to  Europe 
in  1886,  at  the  ripe  age  of  seventy-seven  —  he  had 
been  born  in  the  same  year  with  Poe  and  Gladstone 
and  Lincoln  —  an  invitation  was  at  once  cabled  to 
him  to  dine  with  the  Rabelais,  of  which  he  was  an 
early  member.  And  the  dinner  took  place  on  June 
6;  it  was  the  largest  and  the  most  distinguished 
of  all  the  Rabelaisian  banquets,  and  the  only  one 
at  which  there  was  any  speaking,  for  the  British 
members  wanted  to  hear  how  the  Autocrat  of  the 
Breakfast-Table  would  acquit  himself  at  a  dinner- 
table.  To  me  this  dinner  was  made  memorable 
by  the  presence  of  George  Meredith,  to  whom  Locker 
very  kindly  presented  me  and  with  whom  I  was 
about  to  have  a  talk  that  I  should  have  been  glad 
to  record  here,  if  dinner  had  not  been  announced 
almost  as  soon  as  we  had  shaken  hands. 

We  all  felt  it  to  be  eminently  fit  and  proper  that 
a  club  named  in  honor  of  a  humorist  who  was  a 
physician  should  express  its  admiration  for  a  physi- 
cian who  was  a  humorist.  Holmes  himself  seems  to 
have  had  more  doubts  about  his  hosts  than  we 
Rabelaisians  had  about  our  guest.  "I  was  afraid," 
so  he  wrote  in  the  record  of  his  hundred  days  in 
Europe,  "that  the  gentlemen  who  met 

To  laugh  and  shake  in  Rabelais'  easy-chair 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         285 

might  be  more  hilarious  and  demonstrative  in  their 
mirth  than  I,  a  sober  New  Englander  in  the  super- 
fluous decade,  might  find  myself  equal  to.  But  there 
was  no  uproarious  jollity;  on  the  contrary,  it  was  a 
pleasant  gathering  of  literary  people  and  artists,  who 
took  their  pleasure  not  sadly  but  serenely." 

I  forget  whether  or  not  Leland  was  present  at 
the  dinner  to  Holmes.  If  he  had  seen  the  cordiality 
and  the  character  of  that  gathering  he  might  have 
been  consoled  for  Browning's  refusal  to  accept 
election  to  the  Rabelais  Club.  "I  have  never  got 
over  Browning's  declining, ".Leland  wrote  in  a  letter; 
"I  want  him  to  regret  it.  He  will  regret  it  if  we 
progress  as  we  are  doing."  And  in  another  letter 
Leland  declared  that  he  wanted  "the  Rabelais 
to  coruscate  —  whiz,  blaze,  sparkle,  fulminate,  and 
bang!"  And  all  these  things  it  did  simultaneously 
on  the  evening  of  the  dinner  to  Holmes.  Thereafter 
it  revolved  for  a  while  like  a  catherine-wheel  after 
the  fireworks  have  spluttered  out. 


CHAPTER  XIII 
EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES.    II 


"IT  BEGIN  this  record  with  the  columnar,  self- 
reliant  capital  letter  to  signify  that  there  is 
no  disguise  in  its  egoisms,"  so  Holmes  declared 
on  the  first  page  of  his  account  of  the  visit  to  Europe 
during  which  he  was  the  guest  of  the  Rabelais  Club; 
and  no  reader  of  this  record  of  mine  can  now  expect 
any  attempt  to  disguise  its  egoisms.  I  talk  about 
my  elders  and  betters  as  often  as  I  can,  but  none  the 
less  do  my  wandering  recollections  cluster  around 
myself,  however  modestly  I  may  seem  to  seek  shelter 
behind  others.  Yet  I  do  not  tell  all  that  I  might 
about  my  own  sayings  and  doings,  or  I  should  here 
set  down  in  detail  the  circumstances  of  an  inspection 
of  the  misshapen  and  inconveniently  Gothic  law- 
courts  made  under  the  kindly  guidance  of  the  late 
Sir  Frederick  Pollock;  I  should  describe  a  Kinsmen 
breakfast  at  the  Savile,  when  we  welcomed  Locker 
to  our  ranks;  and  I  should  dilate  upon  a  dinner  at 
the  Garrick  with  J.  Ashby-Sterry  to  meet  E.  W. 
Godwin,  the  architect,  and  W.  G.  Wills,  the  very 
Irish  author  of  the  'Charles  I5  in  which  Irving  was 
so  dignified  and  so  pathetic.  I  should  explain  copi- 
ously the  circumstances  which  led  Rider  Haggard 

286 


EARLY  LONDON   MEMORIES         287 

to  ask  me  to  put  my  name  beside  his  on  *  She,'  which 
he  was  about  to  publish,  and  for  which  he  hoped  to 
be  able  to  secure  an  American  copyright  if  a  citizen 
of  the  United  States  could  claim  to  be  its  joint 
author;  and  I  should  report  the  speeches  at  the 
dinner  given  to  Henry  Irving  on  the  4th  of  July,  1883, 
on  the  eve  of  his  first  visit  to  America,  a  dinner  over 
which  Lord  Coleridge  presided  most  felicitously, 
and  at  which  Lowell,  then  our  representative  in 
Great  Britain,  spoke  in  his  happiest  vein. 

Out  of  the  flotsam  and  jetsam  which  the  dark 
tides  of  Time  deposit  on  the  shallow  shores  of 
Memory,  I  clutch  at  the  vision  of  a  goodly  company 
gathered  in  the  private  dining-room  of  the  Savile 
when  Gosse  invited  a  group  of  his  friends  to  do 
honor  to  Ho  wells.  Of  our  fellow-guests  I  can  re- 
call with  certainty  only  Thomas  Woolner,  the 
sculptor-poet,  Austin  Dobson,  George  Du  Maurier, 
Thomas  Hardy,  and  William  Black.  And  I  can 
rescue  only  two  fleeting  fragments  of  the  talk.  The 
first  was  a  discussion  of  the  reasons  for  the  disappear- 
ance of  revenge  as  a  motive  in  fiction  —  a  discussion 
which  resulted  in  a  general  agreement  that  as  men 
no  longer  sit  up  nights  on  purpose  to  hate  other 
men,  the  novelists  have  been  forced  to  discard  that 
murderous  desire  to  get  even  which  had  been  a  main 
spring  of  romance  in  less  sophisticated  centuries. 

Over  the  second  topic  there  could  be  no  general 
agreement,  since  it  was  a  definition  of  the  image 
called  up  in  our  several  minds  by  the  word  forest. 
Until  that  evening  I  had  never  thought  of  forest 
as  clothing  itself  in  different  colors  and  taking  on 


288  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

different  forms  in  the  eyes  of  different  men;  but  I 
then  discovered  that  even  the  most  innocent  word 
may  don  strange  disguises.  To  Hardy  forest  sug- 
gested the  sturdy  oaks  to  be  assaulted  by  the  wood- 
landers  of  Wessex;  and  to  Du  Maurier  it  evoked 
the  trim  and  tidy  avenues  of  the  national  domain 
of  France.  To  Black  the  word  naturally  brought  to 
mind  the  low  scrub  of  the  so-called  deer-forests  of 
Scotland;  and  to  Gosse  it  summoned  up  a  view  of 
the  green-clad  mountains  that  towered  up  from  the 
Scandinavian  fiords.  To  Ho  wells  it  recalled  the 
thick  woods  that  in  his  youth  fringed  the  rivers 
of  Ohio;  and  to  me  there  came  back  swiftly  the 
memory  of  the  wild  growths,  bristling  up  unre- 
strained by  man,  in  the  Chippewa  Reservation  which 
I  had  crossed  fourteen  years  before  in  my  canoe  trip 
from  Lake  Superior  to  the  Mississippi. 

Simple  as  the  word  seemed,  it  was  interpreted  by 
each  of  us  in  accord  with  his  previous  personal 
experience.  And  these  divergent  experiences  ex- 
changed that  evening  brought  home  to  me  as  never 
before  the  inherent  and  inevitable  inadequacy  of 
the  vocabulary  of  every  language,  since  there  must 
always  be  two  partners  in  any  communication  by 
means  of  words,  and  the  verbal  currency  passing 
from  one  to  the  other  has  no  fixed  value  necessarily 
the  same  to  both  of  them.  If  this  uncertainty  and 
this  variableness  is  obvious  in  ordinary  speech  about 
ordinary  things,  it  is  intensified  in  all  discussions  of 
art.  I  doubt  if  any  two  theorists  ever  agreed  on  the 
exact  content  that  each  of  them  put  into  nature. 
Only  the  men  of  science  have  succeeded  in  casting 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         289 

out  the  personal  equation  and  in  achieving  absolute 
exactness  in  their  terminology.  Horse-power  and 
foot-tons  and  kilo-watts  are  instruments  of  precision, 
understandable  by  all  who  employ  these  terms; 
whereas  classic  and  romantic,  realistic  and  naturalistic 
are  will-o'-the-wisps  and  chameleons,  changing  color 
while  one  looks  at  them. 

It  was  at  this  dinner  given  by  Gosse  to  Howells 
that  I  first  met  William  Black,  and  I  think  we  came 
together  again  once  or  twice  at  one  or  another  of 
the  gatherings  of  The  Kinsmen.  Altho  we  were 
never  intimate,  we  were  friendly  enough  at  our 
few  meetings.  In  my  surprise  at  the  unwarranted 
attack  which  Black  made  on  Mrs.  Pennell  when  she 
failed  to  find  in  his  beloved  Scotland  the  marvellous 
sunsets  he  delighted  in  depicting,  I  was  moved  to 
express  in  print  my  regret  that  "a  British  novelist 
had  been  discourteous  to  an  American  lady."  I 
did  not  mention  Black  by  name;  but  the  cap  fit 
and  he  promptly  put  it  on,  as  I  learned  when  his 
next  novel  was  in  course  of  serial  publication,  some 
one  calling  my  attention  to  a  caricature  in  its  pages 
which  was  plainly  tagged  with  a  contortion  of  my 
name,  "Professor  Maunder  Bathos."  If  it  had  not 
been  for  the  indisputable  label,  I  might  have  failed 
to  find  my  own  features  in  this  highly  colored  por- 
trait done  from  a  distance.  So  keen  was  the  carica- 
turist's own  enjoyment  in  his  own  creation  that  he 
introduced  it  again  into  a  later  tale,  as  I  have  been 
informed.  I  may  note  also  that  Edward  Eggleston 
told  me  that  he  had  used  me  as  the  model  for  one 
of  the  least  important  characters  in  a  New  York 


290  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

novel;  and  this  time  I  could  only  appreciate  the 
kindly  compliment,  the  likeness  not  striking  me  as 
instantly  recognizable. 


II 

One  object  of  my  visits  to  London  in  1881  and  1883 
was  to  enlarge  and  to  verify  the  information  I  had 
been  collecting  for  years  for  a  biography  of  Richard 
Brinsley  Sheridan  —  information  which  I  utilized 
in  my  edition  of  the  'Rivals'  and  the  'School  for 
Scandal/  published  in  1884.  In  1881  Dobson 
gave  me  a  letter  of  introduction  to  the  librarian  at 
the  South  Kensington  Museum  who  was  in  charge 
of  the  Dyce-Forster  collection,  and  who  told  me  at 
once  that  he  had  a  bundle  of  loose  MSS.  which 
seemed  to  relate  to  Sheridan.  It  did  not  take  a 
long  examination  to  disclose  that  these  indigested 
notes  were  the  work  of  the  hireling  scribe  engaged 
to  do  the  drudgery  of  research  by  the  Dr.  Watkins 
who  had  brought  out  two  hasty  and  none  too  favor- 
able volumes  on  Sheridan's  career  shortly  after  the 
death  of  the  dramatist. 

It  was  perhaps  the  careful  search  thru  these  unre- 
lated and  unimportant  scribb lings  which  led  me  to 
perceive  that  Moore  had  used  Watkins  far  more 
often  than  he  was  willing  to  admit,  and  that  he 
took  every  occasion  to  controvert  the  statements 
made  by  his  predecessor,  whom  he  sedulously  re- 
frained from  mentioning  in  his  own  more  wittily 
written  biography.  As  a  result  of  this  desire  to 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         291 

discredit  Watkins,  Moore  had  failed  to  profit  by 
all  the  facts  that  the  earlier  biographer  supplied. 
And  it  was  by  piecing  together  information  gleaned 
from  Moore  and  Watkins  both,  and  by  interpreting 
their  apparent  contradictions,  that  I  was  enabled  to 
solve  what  had  hitherto  been  the  great  mystery  of 
Sheridan's  career.  The  solution  which  I  put  forth 
tentatively  in  1884,  has  been  accepted  by  all  Sheri- 
dan's later  biographers. 

But  I  was  not  satisfied  with  what  I  could  find  in 
the  Dyce-Forster  collection  and  in  the  British  Mu- 
seum, altho  in  the  latter  I  was  able  to  read  the  manu- 
script of  the  very  early  farce-burlesque  'Jupiter,' 
in  which  Sheridan  had  collaborated  with  his  friend 
Halhed,  as  well  as  to  go  over  a  then  unpublished 
comedy,  'A  Trip  to  Bath,'  preserved  in  the  hand- 
writing of  its  author,  Mrs.  Frances  Sheridan,  the 
mother  of  the  author  of  the  'Rivals.'  I  wanted 
also  to  hold  in  my  hands  the  materials  which  the 
family  had  confided  to  Moore  when  he  undertook 
his  biography. 

I  knew  that  Sheridan's  great-grandson,  Lord 
Dufferin,  was  then  in  London;  and  I  hoped  that  he 
might  recall  me  as  the  writer  of  an  article  on  the 
'School  for  Scandal'  published  in  an  American  maga- 
zine, in  1877,  one  hundred  years  after  the  first  per- 
formance, which  I  had  sent  to  him  at  the  time, 
he  being  then  governor-general  of  Canada.  And 
to  him  I  wrote  again  in  1883.,  requesting  access  to 
the  Sheridan  papers.  In  his  courteous  reply  he 
asked  me  to  call  on  him  and  suggested  that  I  should 
apply  direct  to  his  uncle,  Richard  Brinsley  Sheridan. 


292  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

When  I  paid  him  a  visit  by  appointment  he  told  me 
that  all  the  family  papers  were  in  the  possession 
of  his  uncle,  who  lived  at  Frampton  Court,  and  to 
whom  he  had  forwarded  my  request. 

A  day  or  two  later  there  came  a  cordial  invitation 
from  the  grandson  and  namesake  of  Sheridan  to 
run  down  to  Dorchester  in  the  heart  of  the  Wessex 
that  I  knew  only  from  Hardy's  novels.  We  spent 
the  night  at  a  very  Hardyesque  inn  at  Dorchester, 
and  went  to  Frampton  Court  for  luncheon,  when  we 
found  two  other  Americans,  the  daughter-in-law  of 
the  host  and  her  sister,  daughters  of  John  Lothrop 
Motley.  It  was  a  beautiful  day  early  in  July  and 
the  lovely  gardens  were  enticing;  but  while  the  rest 
of  the  party  were  strolling  here  and  there  under  the 
trees  I  was  secluded  in  the  library  turning  over  the 
few  important  manuscripts,  letters,  and  documents 
that  the  family  had  recovered  from  Moore.  From 
these  I  did  not  derive  so  much  profit  as  from  the  well- 
nourished  conversation  of  the  host,  who  was  intensely 
loyal  to  his  grandfather's  much-maligned  memory, 
and  who  was  helpful  to  the  inquirer  from  across  the 
Atlantic.  I  had  a  later  letter  from  Mr.  Sheridan  in- 
forming me  that  by  the  death  of  his  sister,  Lady 
Sterling  Maxwell  (better  known  as  the  Honorable 
Mrs.  Norton),  he  had  come  into  possession  of  three 
large  copy-books  containing  what  appeared  to  be  a 
first  draft  of  the  'School  for  Scandal.'  All  the 
unpublished  material  in  the  hands  of  the  different 
members  of  the  Sheridan  family  was  placed  at  the 
disposal  of  W.  Fraser  Rae  when  he  was  preparing 
the  ample  biography  in  which  the  dramatist-orator 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         293 

was  first  presented  in  proper  proportion  and  in  his 
true  colors. 

My  own  biography  was  little  more  than  an  out- 
line sketch,  and  it  dealt  more  especially  with  his 
work  as  a  comic  dramatist.  It  was  prepared  as  an 
introduction  to  the  two  five-act  comedies,  which 
were  then  for  the  first  time  supplied  with  notes 
elucidating  a  few  of  the  many  eighteenth-century 
allusions  and  pointing  out  the  possible  sources  of 
certain  passages.  The  illustrations  had  been  drawn 
for  Scribner's  Monthly  to  accompany  earlier  articles 
of  mine.  Robert  Blum  provided  dazzling  pen-and- 
ink  sketches  of  Jefferson  as  Bob  Acres  and  of  Mrs. 
Drew  as  Mrs.  Malaprop;  and  C.  S.  Reinhart  repre- 
sented John  Brougham  as  Sir  Lucius,  as  incomparable 
in  that  character  as  Mrs.  Drew  was  in  the  other. 
E.  A.  Abbey  supplied  portraits  of  John  Gilbert 
as  Sir  Peter  and  of  Charles  Coghlan  as  Charles; 
and  here  again  I  am  inclined  to  believe  that  never 
have  these  two  parts  been  more  truthfully  and  more 
richly  impersonated.  Abbey  also  provided  a  charm- 
ing drawing  of  Mrs.  G.  H.  Gilbert  as  Mrs.  Candour 
—  a  character  in  which  that  otherwise  admirable 
actress  might  have  been  expected  to  shine,  but  in 
which,  oddly  enough,  she  never  appeared  to  ad- 
vantage. 

To  round  out  my  collection  of  leading  actors  of 
the  present  in  leading  parts  of  the  past,  I  needed  a 
Lady  Teazle  and  a  Joseph  Surface.  At  my  request 
Henry  Irving  and  Ellen  Terry  were  good  enough  to 
get  out  the  costumes  in  which  they  had  impersonated 
these  opposing  characters  and  to  sit  to  Frederick 


294  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Barnard,  who  made  me  a  most  effective  drawing, 
representing  Lady  Teazle  rising  from  her  chair, 
leaving  the  plausible  Joseph  still  seated  and  look- 
ing up  at  her  hopefully.  When  I  next  saw  Irving 
I  seized  the  chance  to  thank  him  for  his  kindness  in 
going  to  all  the  trouble  of  costuming  himself  and  of 
posing,  and  of  persuading  Miss  Terry  to  the  same 
effort.  He  waved  that  aside,  saying  lightly:  "That's 
of  no  importance.  But  what  is  important  is  that 
your  illustration  will  mislead  all  the  future  his- 
torians of  the  English  stage  on  a  wild-goose  chase  to 
find  out  when  it  was  that  she  and  I  appeared  to- 
gether as  Lady  Teazle  and  as  Joseph.  And  they  are 
doomed  to  disappointment,  for  altho  she  has  been 
Lady  Teazle  often  and  I  used  frequently  to  be  Jo- 
seph, we  have  never  played  these  parts  with  each 
other  —  and  what  is  more  to  the  point,  we  never 
shall.  If  I  ever  revive  the  ( School  for  Scandal'  at 
the  Lyceum,  Ellen  Terry  will  be  Lady  Teazle,  of 
course,  but  I  shall  be  Sir  Peter." 

Then  he  told  me  an  anecdote  of  an  all-star  revival 
of  Sheridan's  masterpiece  at  Drury  Lane  for  a  bene- 
fit in  which  the  aid  was  enlisted  of  all  the  sexagena- 
rian and  octogenarian  celebrities  of  the  stage  who 
emerged  from  their  long-earned  retirement  "for  this 
occasion  only"  —  Helen  Faucit,  Benjamin  Webster, 
Mrs.  Sterling,  Buckstone,  Compton,  Farren  and  the 
rest,  Irving  being  almost  the  only  one  in  the  cast 
who  was  under  fifty.  Lady  Burdett-Coutts  sub- 
scribed for  a  row  of  seats  and  gave  two  tickets  to  two 
aged  ladies  who  rarely  had  the  pleasure  of  theater- 
going. And  when  their  benefactress  asked  them  if 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         295 

they  had  enjoyed  the  performance,  they  replied: 
"Oh,  yes,  my  lady,  thank  you  very  much.  But  we 
did  hate  to  see  such  a  lot  of  wicked  old  people  trying 
to  get  the  better  of  that  good  young  man,  Joseph  !" 


Ill 

At  the  end  of  September,  1883,  I  received  a  note 
from  Walter  Pollock,  telling  me  that  the  editor  of  the 
Saturday  Review  had  resigned  and  that  he  was 
thereafter  to  be  in  charge  of  the  paper;  and  he 
wanted  me  to  become  a  contributor  to  its  columns. 
I  accepted  the  invitation,  and  during  the  eleven 
years  of  Pollock's  editorship  I  wrote  frequently 
for  the  Saturday,  most  frequently  when  I  was 
in  London  for  the  summer,  but  also  occasionally 
when  I  was  at  home  in  New  York,  reviewing  Amer- 
ican books  and  criticising  the  plays  performed  in 
the  New  York  theaters.  My  first  article  gave  an  ac- 
count of  the  visits  of  various  British  actors  to  the 
United  States,  a  topic  timely  in  the  fall  of  1883,  when 
Henry  Irving  was  about  to  come  to  America  for  the 
first  time. 

The  Saturday  Review  was  then  the  property  of  its 
founder,  A.  J.  B.  Beresford-Hope;  and  Pollock  was 
the  third  editor  in  its  less  than  thirty  years  of  life. 
Its  editorial  office  was  in  the  Albany,  where  it  oc- 
cupied G  1,  a  little  set  of  rooms  on  the  ground  floor, 
looking  out  on  Vigo  Street.  The  tradition  of  mystery 
still  lingered  in  its  management;  the  contributors 
were  even  supposed  not  to  know  one  another; 


296  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

and  when  we  visited  the  editor  we  were  shown  into 
one  or  another  of  the  tiny  rooms  wherein  we  waited 
in  solitude  until  the  coast  was  clear  for  us  to  approach 
the  editor  without  danger  of  meeting  some  other 
member  of  the  staff  in  the  short,  dark  hall.  It 
seemed  to  me  that  this  affectation  of  secrecy  was  a 
little  absurd;  especially  did  it  seem  so  when  I  first 
attended  one  of  the  annual  fish-dinners  at  Greenwich 
which  the  proprietor  was  in  the  habit  of  giving  every 
summer  to  all  his  contributors.  I  was  present  at 
two  of  these  very  agreeable  gatherings,  in  June, 
1885,  and  in  July,  1886;  and  I  think  the  second  of 
these  was  the  last  occasion  when  the  large  body  of 
Saturday  Reviewers  had  the  privilege  of  beholding 
themselves  in  mass. 

I  find  that  I  have  preserved  not  only  the  invita- 
tions and  the  bills-of-fare  of  these  banquets,  but  also 
one  of  the  seating  plans  with  the  names  of  the  guests, 
nearly  threescore  and  ten;  and  I  suppose  that  this 
is  a  list  more  or  less  complete  of  those  who  were  then 
contributors  to  the  London  weekly  which  was  still 
a  power  in  British  politics.  I  read  the  names  of 
Arthur  Balfour  and  of  James  Bryce,  but  I  am 
inclined  to  believe  that  they  had  ceased  to  write 
before  I  began.  The  assistant  editor  was  George 
Saintsbury;  and  among  the  most  frequent  writers 
were  Lang,  Dobson,  Gosse,  Wigan,  H.  D.  Traill, 
David  Hannay,  William  Hunt,  Herbert  Stephen,  W. 
E.  Henley,  Richard  Garnett  and  the  editor's  brother, 
the  present  Sir  Frederick  Pollock.  E.  A.  Freeman 
had  only  recently  withdrawn  from  the  Saturday  for 
political  reasons,  after  having  been  an  assiduous  con- 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         297 

tributor  for  a  quarter  of  a  century;  and  his  friend, 
John  Richard  Green,  for  years  a  most  volumi- 
nous writer  in  its  columns,  had  died  in  1883.  Altho 
Green  was  primarily  a  historian,  he  was  also  a  very 
versatile  man  in  his  tastes,  dashing  off  sparkling 
articles  on  social  topics;  and  I  was  informed  by  one 
of  his  intimates  that  most  of  the  somewhat  sensa- 
tional papers  on  the  "Girl  of  the  Period,"  which 
had  enlivened  the  pages  of  the  Saturday  in  the  late 
sixties,  were  due  to  Green  and  not  to  Mrs.  Lynn 
Lynton,  who  was  generally  credited  with  their 
authorship. 

As  I  glance  down  the  seating  plan  I  am  reminded 
that  I  sat  between  Wigan  and  W.  R.  Ralston,  the 
leading  British  authority  on  Russian  literature; 
and  in  the  course  of  our  conversation  I  referred  to  a 
review  bearing  his  signature  which  I  had  read  in 
the  Academy  and  which  praised  a  recent  American 
book  on  the  epic  songs  of  Russia,  and  I  added  that  I 
had  been  patriotically  pleased  to  find  equally  lauda- 
tory comments  on  this  volume  in  the  Athenceum 
and  in  the  Saturday.  Ralston  smilingly  told  me  that 
he  was  responsible  for  those  two  anonymous  reviews 
of  this  American  book  as  well  as  for  his  signed  article. 
"I  did  not  want  to  write  about  it  three  times,"  he 
explained,  "but  I  felt  that  I  ought  to  do  so,  since 
there  is  nobody  else  here  who  takes  any  great  inter- 
est in  Russian  literature.  It  was  a  good  piece  of 
work,  that  American  book;  and  if  I  had  refused  to 
write  those  reviews  it  would  have  had  to  go  without 
notice  —  which  did  not  seem  to  me  quite  fair  to  the 
author."  It  struck  me  then  that  it  was  fortunate 


298  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

for  the  author  that  Ralston  had  taken  so  favorable 
a  view  of  the  volume;  but  I  also  reflected  that  anony- 
mous reviewing  might  readily  put  it  in  the  power  of 
a  personal  enemy  to  attack  a  writer  from  the  ambush 
of  half-a-dozen  different  journals. 

The  Saturday  Review  was  not  hospitable  to  out- 
siders; and  I  doubt  if  the  editors  even  examined  the 
voluntary  offerings  which  might  be  sent  in.  The 
theory  was  that  the  paper  had  a  sufficient,  a  complete, 
a  regular  staff,  who  had  been  invited  and  who  had 
been  tested  by  time.  The  editor  had  such  confi- 
dence in  his  associates  that  he  did  not  even  read 
their  articles  until  these  came  back  to  him  from  the 
printer  in  galley-proof.  Of  course,  he  had  to  ar- 
range his  table  of  contents  for  every  number  and  to 
distribute  his  timely  topics,  so  as  to  avert  repetition 
and  to  secure  variety.  Generally  I  submitted  the 
subject  of  any  paper  I  proposed  to  prepare;  but  when 
I  was  three  thousand  miles  away  I  sometimes  went 
ahead  and  sent  in  my  article  without  previous 
authorization.  And  I  may  confess  frankly  now  that 
it  was  great  fun  for  me,  an  American  of  the  Ameri- 
cans, to  say  my  say  about  American  topics  in  the 
columns  of  the  most  British  of  British  periodicals. 
About  American  politics  I  rarely  expressed  any 
opinion  because  that  topic  had  been  for  years  in  the 
care  of  one  of  the  oldest  contributors  to  the  paper, 
altho  his  long  service  had  not  equipped  him  with 
knowledge  of  the  subject.  Pollock  called  my  atten- 
tion once  to  an  article  on  American  affairs  in  the 
current  number  and  wondered  whether  it  was  not  all 
at  sea  in  its  opinions;  and  I  had  to  answer  that  I 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         299 

had  counted  fifteen  misstatements  of  fact  in  the 
first  column,  whereupon  he  shrugged  his  shoulders 
and  explained  that  he  was  powerless,  since  he  had 
inherited  that  contributor  from  the  preceding  editors. 
I  was  told,  altho  I  forget  by  whom,  that  the  ancient 
light  who  thus  devoted  his  mind  to  the  misunder- 
standing of  American  politics  was  G.  S.  Venables, 
otherwise  unknown  to  fame  except  as  the  man  who 
had  broken  Thackeray's  nose. 

I  think  that  not  a  few  of  the  British  readers  of  the 
Saturday  Review  may  have  been  a  little  surprised 
by  an  article  of  mine,  early  in  1884,  on  'England  in 
the  United  States,'  in  which  I  tried  to  analyze  the 
American  attitude  toward  Great  Britain;  and  cer- 
tainly one  American  reader  of  the  paper  was  struck 
by  it,  since  it  was  taken  as  a  text  for  an  easy-chair 
essay  by  George  William  Curtis,  who  never  suspected 
it  to  be  the  work  of  a  fellow  New  Yorker. 

During  the  first  Cleveland  campaign,  I  prepared 
a  paper  on  'Mugwumps,'  elucidating  the  immediate 
meaning  of  that  abhorrent  word,  which  had  been 
totally  misinterpreted  in  England,  Lang  having  even 
gone  so  far  as  to  rime  a  ballade  with  the  refrain, 
"The  mugwump  never  votes,"  whereas  the  main 
objection  to  him  on  the  part  of  the  persistent  parti- 
sans was  that  he  always  voted.  This  article  led  to 
another  in  which  I  explained  for  the  benefit  of  the 
distant  islanders  a  handful  of  other  'Political  Ameri- 
canisms.' And  in  1886,  when  the  late  R.  A.  Proctor, 
who  made  a  specialty  of  science,  but  who  carried 
omniscience  as  a  side-line,  began  to  publish  in  Know- 
ledge an  ill-informed  essay  on  Americanisms,  I  took 


300  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

delight  in  pointing  out  certain  of  his  blunders,  arous- 
ing him  to  violent  wrath  and  also  to  a  belief  that  the 
corrections  had  been  made  by  Grant  Allen,  who  was 
forced  at  last  to  appeal  to  the  editor  of  the  Saturday 
for  a  formal  letter  exonerating  him  from  the  accusa- 
tion. 

Pollock  left  me  a  wide  choice  of  themes  and  he 
printed  everything  that  I  sent  him,  excepting  only 
one  or  two  minor  papers  in  which  my  nativity  was 
perhaps  too  plainly  disclosed.  More  than  once  he 
confided  to  me  for  review  books  of  American  author- 
ship which  I  found  I  did  not  esteem  highly,  and  these 
I  always  returned,  as  I  was  unwilling  to  say  any- 
thing in  dispraise  of  any  fellow-countryman  when  I 
was  writing  anonymously  in  a  British  weekly,  none 
too  friendly  toward  the  United  States.  On  the 
other  hand,  I  seized  every  opportunity  to  praise  the 
American  authors  in  whose  works  I  delighted;  and 
I  was  glad  to  acclaim  the  high  quality  of  'Huckle- 
berry Finn'  and  of  the  "Rise  of  Silas  Lapham' 
when  these  two  masterpieces  originally  appeared. 
And  I  had  also  earlier  discussed  at  length  the  'Bread- 
Winners,'  the  authorship  of  which  was  then  a  secret 
known  only  to  a  few.  One  of  those  who  knew  was 
Richard  Watson  Gilder,  the  editor  of  the  magazine 
in  which  the  story  had  appeared  as  a  serial;  and  when 
he  happened  to  mention  to  me  the  review  in  the 
Saturday,  I  made  no  mystery  of  the  fact  that  I  was 
responsible  for  it.  Within  a  week  I  chanced  to 
pass  John  Hay  on  Broadway  and  he  waved  his  usual 
friendly  greeting,  then  he  suddenly  stopped  and 
hailed  me  for  a  minute's  chat.  And  I  was  confirmed 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         301 

in  my  conviction  that  he  was  indeed  the  author  of 
the  'Bread- Winners.' 

In  1894  Beresford-Hope  sold  the  Saturday  Review; 
Pollock  ceased  to  be  its  editor;  and  the  old  staff 
ceased  to  contribute.  It  passed  into  alien  hands  and 
its  glory  departed  forever.  It  lost  its  distinctive 
character,  once  for  all,  and  it  became  merely  one 
among  many  London  weeklies,  only  superficially 
to  be  distinguished  from  each  other.  Upon  papers 
like  the  Nation  and  the  Saturday  Review  there  is 
impressed  the  forceful  personality  of  their  founders, 
and  to  a  certain  extent  that  of  the  original  staff 
whom  the  founder  recruited  among  congenial  souls; 
and  when  these  founders  die  or  retire,  the  papers  are 
likely  to  lose  their  individuality  soon,  and  in  time 
their  reputation.  They  may  retain  their  names  to 
all  eternity,  but  the  virtue  has  gone  out  of  them; 
and  they  are  but  the  empty  shell  of  the  rockets  that 
earlier  soared  aloft  in  coruscating  glory. 

IV 

It  was,  I  think,  in  1881,  altho  it  might  not  have 
been  until  1883,  that  I  became  acquainted  with 
Charles  H.  E.  Brookfield,  who  was  a  great  friend  of 
Walter  Pollock's  and  a  fellow-member  of  the  Savile. 
Brookfield  was  a  character-comedian  with  an  unusual 
gift  for  suggesting  varied  types,  partly  by  ingenious 
make-up  and  partly  by  assumption  of  manner.  It 
cannot  be  held,  however,  that  he  was  an  actor  of 
high  rank,  for  he  could  not  carry  a  play  on  his  own 
shoulders,  and  he  was  better  in  what  are  known  on 


302  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

the  stage  as  "bits"  than  in  more  strenuous  parts. 
He  was  a  member  of  the  Bancrofts'  admirable  com- 
pany at  the  Hay  market,  where  I  saw  him  once  as 
Baron  Stein  in  'Diplomacy,'  the  very  British  per- 
version of  Sardou's  'Dora.'  One  summer  when  the 
Bancrofts  were  about  to  close  the  house,  Brookfield 
subleased  it  for  a  season  of  his  own,  having  found  a 
friendly  backer.  "Angels,"  so  it  is  said,  rush  in 
where  fools  fear  to  tread;  and  I  doubt  if  the  financial 
rewards  of  this  summer  season  were  as  ample  as 
the  improvised  manager  had  hoped. 

Brookfield  had  a  pretty  wit  of  his  own,  and  his 
clever  sayings  were  current  in  London  club  circles. 
One  of  them,  almost  the  only  one  that  I  now  re- 
member, was  uttered  the  winter  after  his  venture 
into  management.  One  evening  in  the  greenroom  of 
the  Haymarket,  the  "old  woman"  of  the  company 
was  belauding  the  beauty  of  Mrs.  Bancroft's  hair, 
whereupon  Brookfield  went  up  to  a  mirror  and 
arranged  his  own  locks  lovingly,  remarking  audibly: 
"My  hair  has  also  been  much  admired."  And  the 
old  woman  sharply  inquired:  "Pray  by  whom,  Mr. 
Brookfield?"  To  which  the  ex-manager  responded 
nonchalantly:  "Oh,  by  my  company  —  in  the  sum- 
mer season." 

It  must  have  been  one  afternoon  in  the  summer  of 
1883,  when  Brookfield  and  Pollock  and  I  were 
chatting  after  luncheon  in  the  smoking-room  of 
the  Savile,  that  the  talk  turned  upon  'Vanity  Fair.' 
Brookfield  remarked  to  me  very  casually:  "My 
mother  has  a  lot  of  Thackeray  letters."  When  I 
asked  for  particulars,  he  explained  that  his  parents 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         303 

had  been  very  intimate  with  the  novelist,  and  that 
his  mother  had  preserved  nearly  a  hundred  letters 
to  them  extending  over  long  years,  and  often  adorned 
with  characteristic  drawings.  When  I  inquired 
why  this  correspondence  had  not  been  printed,  he 
replied  that  his  mother  had  offered  them  without  suc- 
cess to  the  London  publisher  who  was  the  owner 
of  the  Thackeray  copyrights.  I  knew  that  the 
law,  laid  down  by  the  English  court  when  Chester- 
field protested  against  the  publication  of  his  letters 
to  his  son,  admitted  the  physical  ownership  of  a 
letter  by  the  recipient  while  reserving  to  the  sender 
the  right  to  control  publication;  and  I  saw  that  the 
situation  was  a  deadlock  since  Mrs.  Brookfield  could 
not  sell  her  letters  for  publication  without  the  per- 
mission of  the  owner  of  Thackeray's  copyrights, 
whereas  the  publisher  could  not  issue  the  corre- 
spondence unless  she  supplied  him  with  the  copy. 

When  Charley  Brookfield  went  on  to  tell  me  that 
Miss  Thackeray  (now  Lady  Ritchie)  had  written  to 
his  mother  a  cordial  approval  of  any  publication 
Mrs.  Brookfield  might  desire,  I  saw  no  reason  why 
Thackeray's  letters  should  not  make  their  first  ap- 
pearance in  the  United  States,  where  there  was  no 
recognition  of  the  exclusive  ownership  of  any  British 
copyright;  and  I  suggested  that  I  should  be  glad  to 
offer  the  correspondence  to  an  American  publisher, 
if  the  Brookfields  would  like  me  to  do  so.  '  Charley 
thanked  me  and  said  he  would  convey  my  proposal 
to  his  mother. 

Two  or  three  times  later  in  that  summer  of  1883 
I  asked  Brookfield  about  the  Thackeray  letters;  and  I 


304  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

always  received  the  same  response  —  that  his  mother 
was  arranging  the  correspondence.  In  the  fall  I 
came  back  to  New  York  for  the  winter;  and  in  the 
spring  of  1884  I  went  over  to  London  again.  As 
soon  as  I  saw  Brookfield  in  the  Savile  I  once  more 
inquired  about  the  correspondence;  and  he  returned 
an  answer  as  before  —  that  his  mother  was  at  work 
upon  the  letters.  I  returned  home  again  in  the  fall, 
having  heard  nothing  further.  Then  most  unex- 
pectedly in  March,  1885,  I  received  a  cable  message: 
"Advise  publication  Thackeray  letters.  Brookfield, 
Haymarket." 

Thus  authorized  I  went  to  Charles  Scribner's 
Sons  and  explained  the  situation;  and  they  told  me 
promptly  that  if  the  correspondence  was  as  charac- 
teristic as  I  believed  it  to  be,  they  would  gladly 
acquire  it.  They  suggested  that  copies  of  a  few 
representative  letters  should  be  sent  to  them  for 
examination.  When  I  reported  this  to  Brookfield  I 
received  a  charming  letter  from  his  mother,  which  I 
showed  to  the  publishers,  who  thereafter  negotiated 
with  her  directly,  my  labors  as  an  intermediary  being 
no  longer  necessary. 

James  Russell  Lowell,  one  of  the  few  survivors  of 
Thackeray's  friends,  was  persuaded  to  go  over  the 
correspondence  and  select  those  letters  most  suitable 
for  publication.  Fortified  by  Lowell's  assistance 
and  by  Miss  Thackeray's  letter  of  approbation,  the 
New  York  publishers  approached  the  London  pub- 
lisher who  controlled  the  Thackeray  copyrights; 
and  they  were  able  to  arrive  at  an  arrangement 
whereby  the  letters  chosen  by  Lowell  appeared  seri- 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         305 

ally  in  the  opening  numbers  of  Scribner's  Magazine, 
issued  simultaneously  on  both  sides  of  the  Atlantic. 
When  at  last  the  correspondence  appeared  in  a  vol- 
ume, it  revealed  for  the  first  time  the  high  position 
that  Thackeray  was  entitled  to  take  among  English 
letter- writers;  and  it  confirmed  the  impression  of 
sweetness  and  of  strength,  of  kindliness  and  of  cour- 
age, which  earlier  could  have  been  only  deduced 
from  his  more  formal  works. 

That  portion  of  the  correspondence  which  Lowell 
had  selected  was  acquired  by  Augustin  Daly,  and 
after  his  death  it  found  a  permanent  resting-place 
in  the  collection  of  autographs  and  manuscripts 
gathered  by  the  late  J.  P.  Morgan.  Those  letters 
which  Lowell  in  his  discretion  thought  it  wiser  not 
to  publish  in  1886,  also  came  to  America  after 
Mrs.  Brookfield's  death.  They  were  long  a  precious 
possession  of  the  most  ardent  and  devoted  collector 
of  Thackerayana,  Major  Lambert,  of  Philadelphia; 
and  at  his  death  they  were  sold  at  auction  one  by 
one  and  scattered  far  and  wide. 


Altho  I  found  at  the  Savile  more  men  of  my  own 
age  and  of  my  own  interests,  I  was  glad  to  be  a  guest 
also  of  the  Athenaeum,  where  Locker  caused  me  to  be 
invited  in  1881,  1883,  and  1884.  To  bestow  on  a 
young  American  man  of  letters  the  privilege  of  stroll- 
ing thru  the  spacious  and  lofty  halls  of  the  most 
dignified  of  London  clubs  was  like  conferring  on  him 
the  power  of  beholding  many  of  the  men  who  had 


306  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

made  the  intellectual  history  of  England.  I  used 
to  see  Cardinal  Manning  consulting  the  catalog  in 
the  silent  library,  and  to  gaze  at  Herbert  Spencer 
playing  billiards  in  the  subterranean  vault  excavated 
under  the  garden  in  the  rear  to  provide  a  pair  of 
little  rooms  for  the  smokers,  who  were  not  then  per- 
mitted to  indulge  their  fondness  for  the  weed  above 
ground.  I  lunched  at  the  Athenaeum  once  with 
Lang  to  meet  Robertson  Smith,  the  Orientalist  who 
was  then  engaged  in  editing  the  Encyclopaedia  Bri- 
tannica. 

Locker  introduced  me  to  Matthew  Arnold,  who 
consented  to  propose  me  for  membership;  and  I 
may  remark  that  the  waiting-list  was  then  so  long 
that  my  name  was  not  reached  for  eighteen  years; 
thus  it  was  only  in  1901  that  I  had  the  pleasure  of 
receiving  notice  of  my  election.  When  we  returned 
home  in  the  Servia  in  October,  1883, 1  was  delighted 
to  discover  that  Arnold  was  a  fellow-passenger  on 
that  first  visit  to  the  America  which  interested  him 
so  keenly  that  he  tried  hard  to  understand  it.  I 
cherish  the  memory  of  the  several  protracted  walks 
on  the  deck  of  the  ship  in  the  course  of  the  voyage 
whereby  I  was  enabled  better  to  appreciate  the 
engaging  simplicity  of  his  character.  I  was  pres- 
ent at  his  opening  lecture  in  New  York,  when  his 
inexperience  in  public  speaking  made  him  almost 
inaudible  to  the  majority  of  the  audience;  and  I 
should  like  to  testify  here  to  the  courtesy  of  my 
fellow-citizens  toward  a  man  whom  they  admired, 
proved  by  the  fact  that  those  who  had  come  to  hear 
remained  seated  to  the  end  in  the  attitude  of  atten- 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         307 

tion,  altho  they  were  able  only  now  and  again  to 
guess  at  the  trend  of  his  discourse. 

It  was  Locker  also  who  made  me  acquainted  with 
Alfred  Ainger,  the  biographer  of  Lamb,  and  one  of 
the  wittiest  and  most  charming  of  conversationalists. 
He  was  a  friend  of  George  Smith,  the  senior  partner 
of  Smith,  Elder  &  Co.,  the  publishers  of  the  Corn- 
hill,  the  magazine  that  Thackeray  had  started  a 
score  of  years  earlier,  that  Leslie  Stephen  had  edited, 
and  that  had  then  been  taken  in  hand  by  James 
Payn,  with  a  consequent  reduction  both  in  its  price 
and  of  its  quality,  much  to  the  disgust  of  Ainger, 
who  had  an  affectional  regard  for  the  monthly  as  it 
had  been  from  the  beginning.  Ainger  knew  that 
Smith  was  also  the  chief  proprietor  of  the  Apollinaris 
Company  and  of  the  Aylesbury  Dairy;  and  this 
moved  him  in  his  disappointment  at  the  downfall 
of  his  favorite  magazine  to  send  to  its  publisher  this 
merry  jest:  "To  George  Smith,  proprietor  of  the 
Aylesbury  Dairy,  of  the  Apollinaris  Company,  and 
of  the  Cornhill  Magazine: 

The  force  of  nature  could  no  farther  go; 

To  form  the  third,  she  joined  the  other  two." 

One  reason  why  the  waiting-list  of  the  Athenaeum 
was  so  long  was  because  the  aged  members  found 
the  club  a  haven  of  rest,  so  quiet  that  "few  died  and 
none  resigned."  Octogenarians  were  common  and 
nonagenarians  were  less  uncommon  within  its  walls 
than  anywhere  else.  This  protracted  longevity  of 
the  members  of  the  Athenaeum  was  brought  home  to 


308  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

me  one  chilly  evening  in  1883  when  Pollock  dined 
with  me  and  when  we  were  joined  by  Palgrave 
Simpson,  the  playwright,  best  recalled  now  by  his 
adaptation  of  the  'Scrap  of  Paper'  from  Sardou's 
'Pattes  de  Mouche.'  After  dinner  we  went  down  to 
the  tiny  smoking-room,  dug  out  of  the  bowels  of  the 
earth,  and  we  took  chairs  in  front  of  the  little  fire- 
place, not  noting  whether  or  not  there  were  other 
members  in  the  seats  which  ran  along  the  walls  on 
three  sides.  Of  course  we  talked  about  the  stage 
and  we  came  in  time  to  consider  the  historic  accu- 
racy of  stage  costumes.  I  ventured  to  express  my 
belief  that  Talma  had  been  the  first  performer  to 
garb  a  Roman  of  old  in  a  flowing  toga;  this  had  been 
designed  for  him  by  David,  and  it  demanded  that  he 
should  don  sandals  on  his  otherwise  bare  feet.  And 
I  added  the  anecdote  of  the  actress  of  the  Frangais, 
who  was  so  shocked  by  this  departure  from  the 
traditional-costume  long  familiar  to  her  in  the 
theater  that  she  cried  out  when  her  eyes  fell  on  the 
actor's  naked  foot:  "Fie,  Talma,  you  look  like  an 
antique  statue !" 

Then  most  unexpectedly  a  voice  from  an  unseen 
man  behind  us  broke  in:  "That  may  be  all  very  well. 
But  the  last  time  /  saw  Talma  he  played  Hamlet  in 
Hessian  boots  !" 

Now,  Talma  had  died  in  1826;  and  here  was  an 
Englishman  telling  us  in  1883  that  he  had  seen 
the  French  actor  more  than  once.  Who  was  this 
belated  survivor  ?  Who  could  he  have  been  ?  Nei- 
ther Pollock  nor  Simpson  recognized  the  voice; 
and  we  did  not  deem  it  polite  to  demand  his  name. 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         309 

In  this  second  decade  of  the  twentieth  century  the 
fact  that  I  have  been  in  the  same  room  with  some 
one  recalling  that  he  had  seen  an  actor  who  died  in 
the  third  decade  of  the  nineteenth  century,  seems  to 
link  me  more  closely  with  the  distant  past.  It  was 
an  experience  highly  characteristic  of  the  Athenaeum. 
And  I  may  comment  here,  more  than  thirty  years 
after  this  experience,  that  I  think  the  memory  of  the 
owner  of  this  unknown  voice  had  betrayed  him,  and 
that  it  was  not  in  'Hamlet'  but  in  the  now  forgotten 
'Stranger'  that  Talma  wore  Hessian  boots. 

On  a  hot  evening  in  July,  1884,  I  dropped  into  the 
Athenaeum  to  dine.  It  was  getting  late  in  the  sea- 
son, and  the  long  dining-room  was  almost  deserted, 
there  being  in  it  only  two  men  at  opposite  ends  of 
the  hall.  After  I  had  given  my  order,  one  of  these 
started  to  go  out;  it  was  Palgrave  Simpson;  he  came 
over  to  me  for  a  few  words,  and  then  went  to  the 
other  solitary  diner.  In  a  moment  he  returned  and 
said  to  me:  "That  is  Lord  Hough  ton  over  there.  He 
is  all  alone  this  evening;  and  when  I  told  him  that 
you  were  an  American,  he  wanted  to  know  whether 
you  would  not  like  to  take  your  dinner  at  his  table  ?" 
Of  course  I  accepted  with  alacrity.  Simpson  took 
me  over  to  Lord  Houghton,  introduced  me,  and  left 
us.  I  knew  Lord  Houghton  as  the  biographer  of 
Keats,  as  the  ardent  advocate  of  a  more  adequate 
copyright  protection  for  authors,  and  as  the  stanch 
friend  of  the  Union  during  the  Civil  War.  I  had 
seen  him  when  he  came  to  America  in  1875,  and  I 
had  been  introduced  to  him  by  Locker  the  summer 
before  in  the  Travellers  Club,  a  fact  which  I  did  not 


310  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

expect  him  to  recall.  He  was  then  just  seventy- 
five,  but  his  vivacity  was  undimmed  by  years;  and 
his  friendliness  of  welcome  to  a  young  stranger  from 
beyond  the  seas  was  undisguised. 

I  asked  him  if  he  ever  intended  to  cross  the  At- 
lantic to  see  us  once  more;  and  he  answered  that  his 
friends  told  him  his  best  poem  was  'Never  Again.' 
He  informed  me  that  he  had  been  one  of  the  five 
members  of  the  House  of  Commons  who  stood  up 
for  the  North  during  the  Civil  War,  two  of  the  others 
being  John  Bright  and  Forster;  and  that  he  had 
always  advocated  cultivating  the  friendship  of  the 
United  States.  Then,  perhaps  in  humorous  explana- 
tion of  his  desire  for  amity  between  his  country  and 
mine,  he  drew  attention  to  his  own  resemblance  to 
the  portraits  of  George  Washington  —  certainly 
striking  so  far  as  the  upper  half  of  the  head  was  con- 
cerned. He  declared  that  Americans  were  then  so 
popular  in  London  society  that  Henry  James  had 
expressed  dread  of  a  reaction  which  might  bring 
about  a  Yankee-Hetze  in  England  as  fierce  as  the 
Juden-Hetze  in  Germany.  He  relished  the  writings 
of  certain  American  authors,  Cable's  'Old  Creole 
Days'  in  particular  and  Mrs.  Burnett's  'Louisiana.' 
He  said  that  Tennyson  had  commended  to  him  Mrs. 
Burnett's  short-story  'Surly  Tim'  and  that  Hallam 
Tennyson  offered  to  read  it  aloud  to  them,  with  the 
warning  that  his  father  would  surely  break  down  at 
one  part.  And  at  the  pathetic  point  in  the  little 
tale  Tennyson  did  break  down,  the  tears  rolling  from 
his  eyes. 

In  the  course  of  our  two  hours'  talk  I  chanced 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         311 

to  mention  that  Charley  Brookfield  was  persuading 
his  mother  to  publish  the  letters  that  Thackeray 
had  written  to  her  and  to  his  father.  Lord  Houghton 
said  that  he  had  always  understood  that  Mrs. 
Brookfield  was  the  original  of  the  heroine  of  'Hen- 
ry Esmond,'  —  an  understanding  confirmed  when 
Thackeray's  letters  to  her  were  printed  three  years 
later.  He  informed  me  that  the  Brookfields  were 
among  Thackeray's  oldest  and  most  intimate  friends, 
and  that  at  one  time  Brookfield  had  been  very  jealous 
of  Thackeray.  "But  don't  say  I  told  you  so!"  he 
added  suddenly;  and  I  should  not  venture  to  set 
this  down  here  if  the  fact  had  not  been  made  plain 
by  the  letters  to  the  Brookfields  which  were  sup- 
pressed by  Lowell,  only  to  become  public  property 
when  the  second  half  of  the  correspondence  was 
scattered  abroad  after  Major  Lambert's  death. 

VI 

In  those  successive  summers  in  London  I  went 
far  more  often  to  the  Savile  than  to  the  Athenaeum; 
and  among  those  whom  I  came  to  know  at  the 
younger  club  was  William  Ernest  Henley.  Already 
in  1878  Austin  Dobson  had  told  me  of  the  ballades 
and  other  French  forms  which  Henley  was  writing 
in  a  weekly  called  London,  then  edited  by  him. 
Dobson  also  informed  me  that  London  was  printing 
a  series  of  strange  tales,  called  the  'New  Arabian 
Nights,'  written  by  a  very  clever  young  Scotchman, 
Robert  Louis  Stevenson.  I  looked  up  the  publica- 
tion-offices of  London  in  some  squalid  side  street, 


312  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

and  I  secured  a  lot  of  the  back  numbers,  in  which  I 
read  Stevenson's  fiction  and  Henley's  rimes,  not 
being  greatly  taken  with  the  latter,  which  seemed  to 
me  then  and  now  also,  to  lack  the  brightness  and 
lightness,  the  unpremeditated  ease  and  the  cer- 
tainty of  stroke,  which  had  charmed  me  in  Dobson's 
ballades  and  villanelles.  It  is  not  in  familiar  verse 
that  Henley  was  to  make  his  mark  as  a  poet  —  in 
so  far  as  he  did  make  his  mark,  —  but  in  the  sledge- 
hammer assertiveness  of  his  intensely  characteristic 

I  am  the  master  of  my  fate, 
I  am  the  captain  of  my  soul. 

In  the  early  eighties  I  saw  a  good  deal  of  Henley. 
I  attended  the  solitary  matinee  at  the  Prince  of 
Wales's  Theater  on  July  2,  1884,  when  'Deacon 
Brodie'  was  first  tested  in  the  fire  of  the  footlights. 
I  contributed  myself  (and  I  also  procured  other 
American  contributions)  to  the  Magazine  of  Art, 
which  Henley  was  then  editing;  and  I  suggested  to 
the  editors  of  the  Critic  that  Henley  might  be  en- 
listed as  their  London  correspondent.  While  this 
engagement  was  pending  he  wrote  me:  "I  think 
I  can  manage  the  work,  —  provided  always  that  I'm 
not  asked  to  praise  Gladstone  and  that  I  can  say 
pretty  much  (within  limits)  what  I  please.  I'd 
rather  like  to  try  my  hand  at  it  anyhow."  He  had 
the  chance  to  try  his  hand  at  it  and  he  was  not  asked 
to  praise  Gladstone;  but  his  connection  with  the 
Critic  was  finally  terminated  mainly  because  Henley 
in  the  fury  of  his  Tory  partisanship  could  not  re- 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         313 

frain  from  filling  his  letters  with  bitter  abuse  of 
Gladstone,  abuse  wholly  out  of  place  in  the  columns 
of  an  American  periodical  devoted  to  gentler  arts 
than  politics. 

This  exuberance  of  animosity  was  just  like  Henley. 
He  had  no  assured  income;  he  did  not  form  new 
connections  easily;  he  needed  the  money  from  this 
correspondence;  but  he  could  not  refrain  from  free- 
ing his  soul  in  print,  regardless  of  the  editors  who 
were  employing  him.  He  was  radically  uncompro- 
mising; and  when  Sidney  Colvin  got  him  the  edi- 
torship of  the  Magazine  of  Art,  it  was  with  the  ut- 
most difficulty  that  he  was  made  to  refrain  from 
uttering  in  every  issue  his  contempt  for  the  crafts- 
manship of  Gustave  Dore,  that  prolific  improviser 
in  black  and  white,  whose  books  were  being  pushed 
by  the  owners  of  the  review  in  which  Henley  was 
urgent  to  abuse  them. 

Henley  was  handicapped  by  physical  disability; 
his  mind  was  sturdier  than  his  body.  It  was  his 
misfortune  also  that  in  the  land  of  his  birth  society 
is  stratified,  like  a  chocolate  layer-cake,  and  that 
the  man  who  is  forceful  enough  to  push  himself  up 
into  a  level  above  that  in  which  he  was  born  is  likely 
to  be  made  acutely  conscious  of  his  struggle  in  the 
ascent.  Henley  started  on  the  lower  rounds  of  the 
social  ladder;  he  was  self-educated,  with  yawning 
gaps  in  his  equipment  for  criticism,  and  yet  with 
superb  self-confidence  in  the  validity  of  his  own 
insight.  He  lacked  breeding;  and  he  came  to  have 
a  truculent  swagger.  Because  he  had  been  able  to 
climb  above  the  station  in  which  he  had  been  born, 


314  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

he  despised  those  of  his  own  class  who  had  not  been 
dowered  with  the  ability  and  the  energy  needed  for 
the  upward  effort;  and  he  reacted  from  his  humble 
origin,  becoming  the  most  violent  of  Tories  and  the 
most  acrid  contemner  of  Radicalism.  But  tho  he 
might  be  a  Tory  of  the  strictest  sect,  he  seems  to 
have  been  always  uneasily  aware  that  he  was  not 
accepted  as  a  gentleman;  and  this  irked  him  and 
gave  him  a  distaste  for  the  gentler  qualities  in 
general.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Henley  was  not  a 
gentleman  when  judged  either  by  the  narrow  defini- 
tion of  the  British  or  by  the  sounder  standard  of  us 
Americans.  In  one  of  my  later  essays,  I  declared 
that  a  certain  burly  British  critic  "preferred  Dick- 
ens, —  because  Thackeray  was  a  gentleman";  and  in 
the  next  letter  I  had  from  Lang  he  told  me  that  he 
had  recognized  my  '.allusion  to  Henley.' 

The  surprising  attack  that  Henley  made  upon  the 
memory  of  Stevenson  was  exactly  what  might  have 
been  expected  by  any  one  who  knew  Henley's  funda- 
mental honesty  and  his  uneasy  self-assertion.  I 
doubt  if  Henley's  article  would  have  pained  Steven- 
son as  much  as  it  did  his  admirers.  After  all,  Steven- 
son was  not  a  bad  judge  of  character;  and  I  think 
that  even  if  he  would  have  deplored  Henley's  atti- 
tude, he  would  understand  it.  I  can  see  no  excuse 
for  Henley's  attack  on  his  friend's  memory,  but  I  can 
see  the  reason  for  it,  clearly  enough.  There  was 
danger  that  the  more  or  less  saintly  R.  L.  S.  painted 
by  the  careful  and  cautious  hand  of  the  cousin  who 
had  prepared  the  official  biography  might  blot  out 
the  true  R.  L.  S.,  very  human  and  often  erring, 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         315 

whom  Henley  had  loved;  and  I  can  understand 
how  he  felt  it  a  duty  laid  on  him  to  snatch  the 
halo  from  the  hero's  head.  Quite  possibly,  Henley's 
honesty  was  more  or  less  stimulated  by  his  jealousy, 
that  all  the  praise  should  go  out  to  Stevenson  and 
that  he  should  be  in  danger  of  survival  only  as 
a  hanger-on  to  the  coat-tails  of  departed  genius. 
When  all  is  said  and  the  account  is  closed,  none 
of  those  who  knew  Henley  in  the  early  eighties 
could  fail  to  feel  that  the  article  on  Stevenson  was 
in  all  its  aspects  completely  characteristic  of  its 
author.  As  E.  A.  Abbey,  whose  acquaintance  with 
Henley  dated  back  almost  as  far  as  mine,  said  to 
me  soon  after  the  damnatory  essay  appeared: 
"Well,  Henley  stood  it  just  as  long  as  he  could,  — 
and  then  he  simply  had  to  let  out.  He  couldn't 
keep  it  in  another  minute!" 

While  I  saw  a  good  deal  of  Henley  in  those  sum- 
mers in  the  eighties,  I  saw  Stevenson  only  once, 
altho  we  had  exchanged  messages  thru  Henley. 
I  knew  that  his  health  was  frail  and  uncertain  and 
that  he  rarely  revisited  the  club;  and  I  doubted 
whether  I  might  ever  stand  face  to  face  with  him. 
Then  on  the  afternoon  of  August  3,  1886,  he  dropped 
into  the  Savile  quite  unexpectedly.  For  most  of  the 
two  hours  that  he  stayed,  the  talk  was  general  and 
I  can  recapture  few  fragments  of  it.  As  the  after- 
noon wore  on,  the  others  dropped  out  until  Steven- 
son and  I  were  left  alone  in  the  smoking-room. 
What  I  remember  most  vividly  was  the  high  appre- 
ciation of  *  Huckleberry  Finn'  that  he  expressed, 
calling  it  a  far  finer  work  artistically  than  'Tom 


316  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Sawyer,'  partly  because  it  was  a  richer  book  mor- 
ally; and  he  wound  up  by  declaring  it  to  be  the 
most  important  addition  to  the  fiction  of  our  lan- 
guage that  had  been  made  for  ten  years. 

Another  book  that  we  discussed  he  did  not  hold  to 
be  so  important;  this  was  my  own  'Last  Meeting,' 
a  brief  novel  which  ought  to  have  been  a  long  short- 
story.  It  had  at  the  core  of  it  a  romantic  idea  which 
I  still  think  to  have  enticing  possibilities  for  a  more 
romantic  writer  than  myself  —  the  idea  that  the 
villain,  after  having  shanghaied  the  hero  for  a  long 
voyage,  on  a  sailing  vessel,  would  journey  to  its  next 
port,  so  that  he  might  repeat  his  marine  kidnapping. 
I  had  sent  the  book  to  Henley  with  a  request  that  he 
might  pass  it  on  to  Stevenson;  and  all  the  news  I 
had  had  of  it  was  contained  in  a  single  sentence  of 
one  of  Henley's  letters  to  me:  "R.  L.  S.  says  he 
wishes  he'd  found  the  shanghaing  himself."  So 
when  Stevenson  and  I  were  abandoned  by  the  others 
he  expressed  at  once  his  interest  in  my  idea  as  it 
was  expounded  toward  the  end  of  the  tale.  "It 
is  a  fine  idea  for  a  story,"  he  declared;  "but  when 
you  had  found  that,  you  ought  to  have  thrown  away 
all  the  earlier  part  of  the  story  and  have  written 
straight  up  to  the  effect  which  alone  made  it  worth 
while." 

I  knew  that  his  words  were  golden;  but  honesty 
compelled  me  to  confess  that  I  had  started  with  the 
fine  idea  and  that  if  I  had  failed  to  lead  up  to  it 
adequately,  it  was  because  I  had  mischosen  my 
method.  As  a  dramatist  by  inclination,  I  could 
never  begin  any  narrative  unless  I  knew  exactly  how 


EARLY  LONDON  MEMORIES         317 

it  was  going  to  turn  out  and  unless  I  foresaw  its 
devious  windings.  Stevenson's  sole  response  was 
to  say  that  it  was  a  pity  I  had  maltreated  an  effect 
worthy  of  a  more  appropriate  handling.  My  blunder 
was  in  putting  so  purely  romantic  a  motive  in  a 
more  or  less  realistic  setting  of  literary  life  in  New 
York  with  its  atmosphere  of  superabundant  small- 
talk.  Henley  had  written  to  me  that  the  book 
"is  dreadfully  like  your  talk.  Not  that  I  don't 
like  your  talk;  you  know  very  well  that  I  do.  But 
talk  is  talk,  and  writing's  writing,  and  both  are  best 
in  their  proper  places"  -and  this  has  always 
seemed  to  me  one  of  the  shrewdest  and  soundest  of 
Henley's  criticisms.  He  went  on  with  equal  wit 
and  wisdom  to  object  to  the  "crackle  of  cleverness" 
in  the  conversations  of  my  characters,  which  affected 
him  "like  the  noise  of  an  electric  spark.  I  got 
tired  of  you  and  them,  as  I  do  of  a  high-tuned  lunch 
at  the  Savile.  I  long  for  a  few  flashes  of  stupidity." 


CHAPTER  XIV 
ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING 


A  the  very  beginning  of  this  personal  narra- 
tive I  remarked  on  the  strangeness  of  the 
fact  that  I  was  not  permitted  to  practise  the 
profession  for  which  my  father  had  trained  me  and 
that  I  had  never  been  able  to  attain  a  recognized 
position  in  the  profession  for  which  I  had  trained 
myself.  From  my  youth-  up  my  strongest  literary 
ambition  was  to  write  plays  and  to  have  the  perilous 
pleasure  of  seeing  them  performed.  I  knew  that 
the  stern  craft  of  play-making  was  far  more  difficult 
to  acquire  than  the  more  relaxed  art  of  novel-writing; 
I  recognized  that  a  more  determined  will  was  neces- 
sary to  overcome  the  obstacles  which  bar  the  path  of 
the  dramatist,  far  more  disagreeable  than  those  which 
the  novelist  has  to  pass  thru;  and  I  was  fully  aware 
that  the  fate  of  a  play  may  depend  on  the  choice  of 
the  theater  in  which  it  is  produced  and  on  the 
choice  of  the  company  by  which  it  is  performed 
no  less  than  upon  the  uncertain  temper  of  the 
spectators  who  assemble  to  judge  it.  I  was  familiar 
with  the  element  of  sheer  luck,  of  blind  chance,  which 
seems  so  often  to  decide  the  destiny  of  a  play.  I 
did  not  deny  that  the  career  of  a  dramatist  was  neces- 

318 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING    319 

sarily  an  unending  gamble,  with  the  odds  as  heavily 
against  him  who  essays  it  as  those  which  must  be 
accepted  by  the  frequenter  of  Monte  Carlo. 

None  the  less  that  was  the  career  to  which  I  aspired, 
aleatory  as  it  might  be.  I  admitted  the  difficulties 
and  dangers  of  the  calling,  but  they  did  not  daunt 
me.  I  wanted  to  write  plays,  simply  because  that 
was  what  I  enjoyed  most.  I  had  no  desire  to  use 
the  stage  as  a  platform  from  which  to  preach;  I 
was  not  charged  with  a  message  for  which  I  sought 
the  theater  as  a  sounding-board;  and  I  had  no  lofty 
ideals  of  the  poetic  drama.  All  I  wanted  was  the 
privilege  of  writing  plays,  just  for  the  fun  of  it, 
because  I  got  more  pleasure  out  of  the  long  protracted 
gestation,  out  of  invention  and  development  and 
construction  and  adjustment,  than  I  could  find  in 
any  other  form  of  literary  labor.  I  might  turn 
aside  from  the  achieving  of  this  ambition  to  criticize, 
to  devise  short-stories,  even  to  elaborate  more  sub- 
stantial novels;  but  in  my  own  eyes  at  least  I  was 
always  potentially  a  playwright;  and  when  I  was 
telling  a  story,  all  unconsciously  the  shaping  of  this 
narrative  was  in  accord  with  the  severer  principles  of 
dramatic  construction. 

As  I  look  back  over  more  than  twoscore  years  of 
literary  activity  I  am  well  aware  that  such  reputa- 
tion as  I  may  have  won  has  been  conquered  in  other 
fields  than  the  drama;  and  I  am  no  longer  surprised 
when  juvenile  critics,  cavilling  at  one  of  my  declara- 
tions of  the  fundamental  principles  of  the  drama- 
turgic art,  are  moved  to  intimate  that  I  can  have  had 
no  personal  experience  as  a  practical  playwright. 


320  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

It  is  a  melancholy  fact  that  nothing  fades  more 
swiftly  or  more  totally  from  the  memory  of  men  than 
the  piece  which  merely  rounds  out  a  fairly  honorable 
existence  on  the  boards,  —  nothing,  that  is,  except 
the  piece  which  has  met  with  blank  failure  at  the 
beginning.  The  name  of  a  dead  and  damned  play 
is  simply  sponged  out  of  the  minds  even  of  those 
who  have  been  present  when  it  struggled  vainly 
for  the  life  that  was  denied  it. 

So  it  is  that  I  am  not  disappointed  when  very  few 
even  of  my  friends  are  aware  that  I  have  had  half- 
a-dozen  plays  produced  in  New  York  and  that  two 
of  these,  'A  Gold  Mine'  and  eOn  Probation/  were 
acted  all  over  the  United  States  for  several  seasons, 
one  by  Nat.  C.  Goodwin  and  the  other  by  Wm.  H. 
Crane.  While  two  out  of  the  six  were  distinctly 
successful  on  the  stage,  even  if  they  were  not  tumultu- 
ously  triumphant,  two  others  were  less  successful, 
perhaps  on  account  of  their  own  defects,  and  per- 
haps, as  I  confess  I  fondly  prefer  to  believe,  because 
of  unfortunate  circumstances  connected  with  their 
several  performances.  The  two  remaining  were  one- 
act  pieces,  which  attained  to  as  considerable  a  popu- 
larity as  is  now  possible  to  these  diminutive  dramas, 
the  theatrical  equivalents  of  the  short-story.  Partly 
because  I  have  undertaken  in  these  pages  to  cele- 
brate myself  and  am  therefore  bound  to  discuss 
my  adventures  and  misadventures  in  the  theater, 
and  partly  because  I  feel  that  in  these  stage  experi- 
ences of  mine  there  may  be  a  latent  moral  for  aspir- 
ing playwrights  of  a  younger  generation,  I  have 
no  hesitation  in  here  setting  down  succinctly  some 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING    321 

part  of  the  brief  history  of  these  six  plays  of  mine 
and  also  of  a  few  others  that  never  saw  the  light  of 
the  lamps. 

II 

In  the  mid-years  of  the  nineteenth  century  the 
English-speaking  stage  was  a  thrall  of  the  French 
theater;  and  no  stigma  attached  to  the  adapting  a 
Parisian  play  to  Anglo-Saxon  conditions  without 
consulting  the  foreign  author  who  had  then  no  re- 
dress against  this  spoliation  either  in  Great  Britain 
or  the  United  States.  A  very  large  proportion  of  the 
pieces  signed  by  Dion  Boucicault  and  by  Tom  Tay- 
lor were  thus  filched  from  the  foreigner,  altho  both 
these  British  dramatists  had  proved  their  possession 
of  the  ability  to  write  original  plays  of  their  own, 
decidedly  superior  in  value  to  those  they  were  ac- 
customed to  borrow  from  the  French.  This  levy- 
ing on  the  alien,  this  conveying  of  foreign  comedies 
over  into  English  without  so  much  as  a  by-your- 
leave,  was  almost  universal  in  the  sixties  and  the 
seventies  of  the  nineteenth  century;  and  even  W.  S. 
Gilbert,  who  shrieked  aloud  in  pain  when  *H.  M.  S. 
Pinafore'  was  pirated  in  the  United  States,  had  no 
hesitation  either  in  transposing  Labiche's  'Chapeau 
de  Paille  d'ltalie'  into  the  'Wedding  March,5  to 
which  he  affixed  his  own  signature,  or  in  boasting 
of  the  profits  of  this  exploit. 

It  did  not  occur  to  me  when  I  was  in  my  'teens 
that  there  was  anything  wrong  in  this  lifting  of  plays 
from  one  language  to  another  with  no  consideration 
of  the  rights  of  the  original  author.  I  was  subdued 


THESE  MANY  YEARS 

to  what  I  worked  in;  and  in  an  earlier  chapter  I 
have  told  how  I  made  two  adaptations  from  the 
French,  with  no  conviction  of  wrong-doing.  These 
were  both  one-act  pieces;  and  I  have  mentioned  the 
single  performance  of  'Very  Odd'  by  Stuart  Robson 
in  Indianapolis,  and  the  many  performances  of  'Frank 
Wylde'  by  amateurs  in  New  York  and  elsewhere. 

My  next  venture,  undertaken  in  1874,  was  more 
ambitious;  it  was  a  version  of  a  play  by  Theodore 
Barriere,  author  of  the  long  popular  piece  called 
in  English  the  'Marble  Heart.'  The  original  was 
in  three  acts;  and  I  utilized  a  one-act  comedy  of 
Barriere's  to  supply  a  fourth  act.  I  called  my 
piece  'Edged  Tools'  and  I  intended  it  for  Daly's 
Theater,  where  another  rather  somber  but  very  affect- 
ing play  of  Barriere's  entitled  'Alixe'  had  won  suc- 
cess, due  in  large  part  to  the  powerfully  pathetic 
acting  of  Clara  Morris  in  the  name-part.  I  see 
now  that  the  story  of  'Edged  Tools'  was  false,  as 
well  as  artificial,  and  I  am  not  surprised  that  Daly 
declined  it  in  a  letter  which  I  have  preserved,  dated 
in  May,  1874,  and  in  which  he  said  that  he  found  my 
piece  "admirably  written,  bright  and  crisp"  but 
"not  dramatic  enough  to  carry  the  play  thru." 
A  little  later  the  play  was  accepted  for  early  pro- 
duction by  an  admirable  old-school  actress,  Char- 
lotte Thompson,  who  had  recently  been  remarkably 
successful  in  an  adaptation  of  a  German  dramatiza- 
tion of  'Jane  Eyre.'  For  one  reason  or  another  she 
postponed  the  performance  of  'Edged  Tools,'  sick- 
ening me  with  deferred  hope,  until  at  last  she  retired. 
By  that  time  the  taste  for  French  pieces  of  the  type 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING    323 

to  which  my  adaptation  belonged  was  rapidly  pass- 
ing, and  I  think  I  had  begun  to  suspect  the  fragility 
of  the  story  and  to  be  no  longer  anxious  to  see  it 
acted. 

In  those  days  I  followed  closely  the  Parisian  stage, 
studying  Sarcey's  weekly  review  in  the  Temps  and 
often  consulting  the  criticisms  in  the  Figaro  and 
elsewhere.  When  a  melodrama  called  the  'Officier 
de  Fortune, '  based  on  the  adventures  and  escapes  of 
Baron  Trenck,  was  produced  at  the  Ambigu  in 
Paris  in  1874,  my  old  schoolfellow  at  Charlier's, 
Henry  French  (son  of  the  theatrical  publisher, 
Samuel  French,  whose  yellow-backed  acting  editions 
of  the  standard  drama  still  sell  by  thousands)  was 
speculating  in  plays;  and  he  proposed  to  buy  this 
piece  for  me  to  adapt.  But  before  we  could  make  an 
offer,  the  play  was  published  and  it  was  thereby 
deprived  of  all  protection  by  our  courts,  as  the  law 
then  stood.  As  soon  as  a  copy  of  the  piece  reached 
New  York  I  adapted  it.  I  knew  that  one  of  its  chief 
figures  had  been  Frederick  the  Great  and  that  the 
French  authorities,  dreading  the  possible  political 
consequences  of  the  appearance  of  a  Prussian  king 
on  the  Parisian  stage,  had  insisted  that  this  character 
should  become  an  Elector  of  Bavaria.  I  ran  hastily 
thru  Carlyle's  biography  and  I  restored  the  great 
soldier  to  the  play  from  which  he  had  been  exiled 
by  the  French  censors.  I  made  many  other  modifica- 
tions, condensing  freely,  since  New  York  playgoers 
are  less  tolerant  of  prolixity  than  the  Parisians.  I 
passed  over  the  manuscript  to  Henry  French,  who 
endeavored  vainly  to  get  it  produced.  Nearly 


324  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

three  years  later  I  was  present  at  the  first  night  of 
Daly's  'Princess  Royal/  in  April,  1877;  and  I 
recognized  the  'Officier  de  Fortune.'  I  thought  I 
also  perceived  traces  of  my  own  handiwork,  espe- 
cially as  Frederick  the  Great  appeared  frankly  as 
himself  and  not  disguised  as  a  Bavarian.  And  a  few 
years  thereafter  I  was  made  certain  of  this  when 
we  were  guests  at  one  of  Daly's  midnight  suppers  in 
his  office  after  the  play.  I  took  occasion  to  ask  him 
if  he  had  used  as  the  basis  of  his  'Princess  Royal' 
an  adaptation  he  had  received  from  Henry  French. 
He  admitted  this  at  once;  and  then  I  told  him  that 
I  was  responsible  for  it.  And  his  sole  comment  was : 
"Ah,  I  didn't  know  that." 

In  the  spring  of  1878  Bunner  and  I  collaborated 
in  a  very  free  rendering  into  English  of  a  French 
farce,  the  'Poudre  d'Escampette,'  which  had  been 
fairly  successful  at  the  Varietes  in  Paris  a  few  years 
earlier.  We  called  our  piece  'Touch  and  Go';  and 
it  was  an  example  of  what  the  Romans  used  to  call 
contaminatio9  because  we  had  drawn  upon  another 
French  farce  for  more  than  one  situation  which  we 
adjusted  as  best  we  could  into  the  plot  of  the  'Poudre 
d'Escampette.'  We  had  written  our  piece  with  an 
eye  single  to  my  old  friend,  Harry  Beckett,  the  low 
comedian  of  Wallack's,  an  excellent  Bob  Acres  in 
the  'Rivals,'  and  an  unsurpassable  Harvey  Duff 
in  the  'Shaughraun.'  Beckett  was  highly  pleased 
with  the  uproarious  fun  of  our  farce  and  he  accepted 
the  play  on  the  spot.  But  before  he  could  start  on 
his  starring  tour  his  health  failed,  and  after  a  brief 
interval  his  death  followed. 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING    325 

Banner  and  I  offered  our  play  to  various  managers 
and  actors  all  in  vain;  and  as  Bunner  playfully  asked, 
"if  the  managers  won't  touch  it  how  can  the  people 
go  to  see  it?"  Then  its  extravagant  exuberance 
captivated  John  T.  Raymond,  who  had  solidly 
established  himself  as  a  star  by  his  most  felicitous 
Colonel  Sellers  in  the  very  sketchy  play  that  Mark 
Twain  had  made  out  of  the  'Gilded  Age.'  Ray- 
mond persuaded  his  managers  to  make  a  contract 
with  us  and  to  pay  us  a  part  of  the  purchase  price 
in  advance,  —  the  first  money  I  ever  earned  by  my 
work  for  the  theater.  This  contract  was  signed  in 
May,  1882;  and  as  we  came  down  the  stairs  of  the 
manager's  office  one  of  us  said:  "Now  a  manager 
has  touched  it,  we  shall  see  soon  whether  the  people 
will  go."  That,  however,  was  something  we  were 
not  to  see,  since  'Touch  and  Go'  was  never  pro- 
duced. It  was  announced  more  than  once;  and  I 
think  that  it  even  got  into  rehearsal;  yet  it  did  not 
make  its  appearance  before  the  public,  for  reasons 
which  I  never  ascertained,  altho  they  were  probably 
the  result  of  a  more  cold-blooded  analysis  of  the 
manuscript,  an  ordeal  almost  always  fatal  to  a  farce 
because  its  fundamental  whimsicality  will  rarely 
support  the  touch  of  the  scalpel  or  the  test  of  the 
microscope. 

Only  once  again  was  I  guilty  of  an  adaptation. 
This  was  in  March,  1889,  at  the  end  of  Coquelin's 
first  visit  to  the  United  States  when  he  wanted  to 
appear  in  a  piece  written  in  English.  He  said  to  me 
suddenly  one  day,  "I'm  going  to  cable  to  Paris  for 
Dreyfus's  'Un  Crane  sous  une  Tempete,'  and  I  want 


326  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

you  to  adapt  it  for  me  so  that  I  can  play  it  with 
Mrs.  Booth."  I  told  him  that  he  need  not  send  to 
Paris,  as  I  already  had  all  Dreyfus's  plays  and  that  I 
should  be  very  glad  indeed  to  turn  any  of  them  into 
English  for  him.  Coquelin's  choice  was  very  happy, 
since  there  are  only  two  characters  in  the  little  piece 
and  the  heroine  is  so  emotional  and  so  voluble  that 
the  hero  has  never  a  chance  to  speak  a  single  word. 
Coquelin  could  converse  in  English  if  he  had  to;  but 
he  preferred  to  confine  himself  to  French.  Agnes 
Booth  (the  widow  of  Junius  Brutus  Booth,  brother 
of  Edwin  Booth)  was  then  the  wife  of  John  B. 
Schoeffel,  who  was  a  partner  with  Henry  E.  Abbey 
and  Maurice  Grau  in  the  management  of  Coquelin' s 
tour.  She  was  the  most  brilliant  actress  of  comedy 
then  visible  on  the  American  stage.  I  called  my 
translation  the  'Silent  System';  and  at  Coquelin's 
request  I  added  to  his  part  the  few  words  of  farewell 
which  he  desired  to  address  to  the  American  public 
on  his  departure  for  home.  One  picturesque  incident 
of  this  performance  must  be  duly  registered  here. 
The  wife  scolds  the  husband  because  he  is  late  and 
because  he  has  forgotten  her  birthday;  and  at  the 
end  he  overwhelms  her  by  producing  from  his  pocket 
a  jewel-box  containing  a  bracelet,  which  is  at  once 
his  excuse  for  his  tardiness  and  his  proof  that  he  has 
not  failed  to  remember  her  birthday.  And  Coquelin 
surprised  Mrs.  Booth  by  the  gift  of  a  beautiful  brace- 
let which  he  had  bought  specially  for  her  in  recogni- 
tion of  her  kindness  in  playing  the  part  with  him. 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING    327 


III 

In  the  fall  of  1878  I  wrote  my  first  original  play, 
a  comedy-drama,  ultimately  entitled  'Margery's 
Lovers.'  I  wrote  it  for  Lester  Wallack,  the  only 
actor-manager  in  New  York,  in  the  hope  that  the 
attraction  of  the  part  I  was  devising  for  the  actor 
might  be  potent  enough  to  persuade  the  manager  to 
produce  it.  Wallack  was  not  a  great  actor,  partly 
because  he  lacked  intelligence  and  partly  because  he 
was  deficient  in  taste.  But  he  was  an  expert  come- 
dian of  indisputable  authority  over  his  public.  I 
had  seen  him  in  all  his  best  characters  and  I  had 
admired  him  especially  in  'Diplomacy'  and  in  'Ours,' 
—  altho  I  recognized  the  accuracy  of  Harry  Beckett's 
criticism  of  Wallack's  performance  in  the  final  act 
of  this  second  piece  —  that  he  descended  from  light 
comedy  to  low  comedy,  only  a  little  removed  from 
clowning. 

The  character  I  elaborated  for  Wallack  in  'Mar- 
gery's Lovers'  seemed  to  me  to  possess  the  kind  of 
theatrical  effectiveness  which  would  appeal  to  him 
and  which  he  could  bring  out  admirably.  It  was  a 
man  born  lazy  yet  capable  of  vigorous  action  when 
he  saw  the  necessity  for  it.  He  dawdles  thru  two 
acts,  uttering  all  the  clever  things  I  could  invent, 
suddenly  waking  up  at  the  end  of  the  second  act 
when  the  younger  hero  finds  himself  unexpectedly  in 
a  dangerous  situation;  and  therefore  in  the  third  act 
he  is  all  activity  in  his  successful  effort  to  clear  the 
character  of  his  friend,  relapsing  just  before  the 


328  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

curtain  finally  falls  into  his  former  languor  and 
lazily  permitting  the  woman  he  has  wooed  to  pro- 
pose to  him. 

Wallack  read  the  play  as  soon  as  I  sent  it  to  him, 
and  he  told  me  that  he  liked  it  very  much.  But  he 
could  not  make  up  his  mind  to  produce  it;  and  after 
waiting  eighteen  months  I  withdrew  the  manuscript 
in  spite  of  his  surprised  protest.  I  think  that  his 
hesitancy  was  due  to  the  American  authorship  of 
the  play.  Wallack,  altho  he  had  been  born  here, 
was  resolutely  British  all  his  days.  It  was  said  that 
he  kept  the  Union  Jack  flying  over  his  country  home 
at  Long  Branch;  and  the  same  standard  might  as 
well  have  floated  over  his  theater  in  New  York. 
This,  I  think,  was  the  cause  of  his  final  failure;  he 
remained  an  alien  in  the  city  of  his  birth;  and  he 
never  attained  to  that  intimate  perception  of  the 
likes  and  dislikes  of  his  fellow-citizens,  which  is  the 
most  precious  possession  of  a  theatrical  manager. 
He  was  so  British  in  his  feelings  that  when  Bronson 
Howard  brought  him  'Drum-Taps/  afterward  re- 
written as  'Shenandoah,'  he  asked  if  the  American 
playwright  could  not  transpose  this  intensely  Amer- 
ican story  of  the  Civil  War  and  "make  it  the  Crimea." 
In  one  of  our  conversations  over  my  manuscript  he 
bewailed  that  he  did  not  understand  his  public.  "I 
used  to  bring  over  all  the  latest  London  successes 
and  to  revive  the  old  comedies  and  to  have  a  new 
piece  now  and  then  by  Dion  or  John"  (Boucicault 
and  Brougham);  "and  we  got  along  very  nicely;  — 
but  now  I  really  don't  know  what  they  want." 

I  trust  I  have  made  it  plain  that  Wallack  did  not 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING    329 

actually  refuse  my  play  and  that  I  withdrew  it  from 
him  before  he  could  bring  himself  to  a  decision.  I 
offered  it  to  Daly  and  to  A.  M.  Palmer,  both  of 
whom  declined  it,  —  without  greatly  discouraging 
me,  since  neither  of  them  had  then  in  his  company 
a  comedian  specially  qualified  for  the  part  I  had 
cut  to  Wallack's  measure.  So  in  the  summer  of  1881 
I  took  the  play  over  to  London  and  submitted  it  to 
Charles  Coghlan,  an  actor  of  keen  intelligence  and 
of  unusual  technical  accomplishment.  He  liked  the 
play,  or  at  least,  he  liked  the  part;  and  he  recom- 
mended it  to  his  manager,  Edgar  Bruce.  When  I 
had  to  return  to  America  in  the  fall  Bruce  was  still 
undecided;  and  when  I  went  back  to  England  in  the 
spring  of  1883  I  found  that  Bruce  had  mislaid  my 
manuscript  and  that  Coghlan  had  accepted  an  en- 
gagement in  New  York. 

Luckily  I  had  another  copy  of  the  play  with  me 
in  London  and  it  was  promptly  accepted  by  John 
Clayton  and  Arthur  Cecil  of  the  Court  Theater, 
where  it  was  not  produced  until  long  after  I  had 
to  return  to  the  United  States.  On  February  28, 
1884,  it  had  its  long-deferred  first  performance,  more 
than  six  years  after  it  had  been  composed.  The 
cast  was  excellent,  Mrs.  John  Wood,  Mrs.  Beerbohm 
Tree,  Charles  Cartwright,  Arthur  Cecil,  and  John 
Clayton,  who  seemed  to  me  almost  an  ideal  choice 
for  the  character  composed  originally  for  Wallack, 
but  who  was  responsible  in  part  for  the  ineffective- 
ness of  the  performance,  since  he  represented  my 
lazy  man  as  a  sleepy  man,  who  diffused  the  desire 
to  slumber  among  the  spectators. 


330  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

Three  years  later  A.  M.  Palmer  began  a  series  of 
Author's  Matinees  at  the  Madison  Square  Theater, 
bringing  out  in  turn  George  Parsons  Lathrop's 
'Elaine,'  Howells's  dramatization  of  his  'Foregone 
Conclusion,'  and  my  'Margery's  Lovers,'  each  of 
them  having  a  run  limited  to  one  consecutive 
matinee,  altho  all  of  them  were  frequently  repeated 
when  the  company  paid  a  summer  visit  to  Chicago. 
In  these  performances  by  Palmer's  company  in  1887 
I  was  again  unfortunate  in  the  performer  of  the 
Wallack  part,  which  was  intrusted  to  E.  M.  Hol- 
land, an  excellent  actor  in  characters  of  a  different 
type  but  not  the  authoritative  light-comedian  I  had 
had  in  mind. 

On  the  other  hand,  I  was  most  fortunate  in  my 
villain,  impersonated  by  Alexander  Salvini,  son  of 
the  great  Italian  actor.  When  I  had  finished  the 
revision  of  my  play,  I  had  to  confess  to  myself  that, 
whatever  originality  I  might  have  been  able  to  be- 
stow upon  certain  of  the  other  characters,  the  villain 
was  frankly  a  stage- villain  quite  devoid  of  veracity. 
My  acquaintance  with  bad  men  has  never  been  wide; 
and  this  bad  man  was  not  created  by  imagination 
working  on  observation;  he  was  "made  up  out  of 
my  own  head";  that  is  to  say,  he  was  a  bald  copy 
of  the  bold  bad  men  who  had  intrigued  and  been 
discomfited  in  countless  earlier  plays.  But  Salvini 
took  this  black  profile  of  malign  intent  and  lent 
it  a  subtlety  of  color  which  deceived  the  audience 
into  the  belief  that  he  was  representing  an  accusable 
human  being.  In  fact,  one  reviewer  of  the  per- 
formance at  the  Madison  Square  singled  out  for 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING 

cordial  commendation  my  invention  of  a  novel  type 
of  stage- villain  —  praise  that  belonged  of  right  to 
the  actor  of  the  part  and  not  to  the  author  of  the 
play.  This  brought  home  to  me  what  I  have  else- 
where called  the  "paradox  of  dramatic  criticism,"- 
that  the  first-night  reviewer  of  a  new  piece  has  to 
form  his  impression  from  the  performance;  he  can 
see  the  play  only  thru  the  rendering  by  the  per- 
formers and  he  can  see  the  acting  only  thru  the  me- 
dium of  the  play,  so  that  he  is  in  danger  of  misjudg- 
ing both  the  playwright  and  the  players. 

As  a  mere  matter  of  record  I  must  mention  that 
when  ' Margery's  Lovers'  was  produced  in  London, 
in  1884,  a  certain  H.  P.  Stephens,  librettist  of  'Billee 
Taylor'  and  other  operettas,  charged  that  it  had 
been  stolen  bodily  from  a  play  of  his  called  '  Hearts ' 
which  he  had  submitted  only  two  years  before  to 
Palmer  and  to  Daly.  Of  course,  I  asserted  the  orig- 
inality of  my  piece  and  I  denied  all  knowledge  of 
his,  supporting  my  assertion  with  letters  from 
Bunner  and  from  Daly,  declaring  that  they  had 
read  my  manuscript  years  before  the  date  when 
Stephens  declared  that  he  had  written  his. 

IV 

It  was,  I  believe,  in  1885  that  Bunner  introduced 
me  to  George  H.  Jessop,  an  Irishman  of  my  own 
age,  a  graduate  of  Trinity  College,  Dublin,  where 
he  had  been  a  favorite  pupil  of  Dowden's.  Jessop 
was  a  younger  son  of  a  good  Irish  family  of  Crom- 
wellian  stock;  and  his  ancestors  were  the  owners 


332  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

of  the  estate  in  Ireland  where  Goldsmith  had  him- 
self made  the  blunder  of  taking  a  private  house  for 
an  inn  —  a  blunder  which  served  him  later  as  the 
basis  of  'She  Stoops  to  Conquer.'  Jessop  had  taken 
his  young  brother's  portion  in  1873  and  had  trav- 
elled in  Europe,  crossed  to  the  United  States  and 
wandered  in  time  to  San  Francisco,  where  he  awoke 
one  morning  to  the  total  exhaustion  of  his  funds. 
After  disheartening  experiences,  some  of  which  he 
utilized  later  at  my  suggestion,  in  the  several  short- 
stories  contained  in  the  volume  called  'Gerald 
French's  Friends,'  he  was  able  to  establish  himself 
as  a  journalist.  At  the  request  of  an  actor  who 
asked  him  to  write  a  play  with  "a  good  Jew"  as 
its  hero,  he  composed  'Sam'l  of  Posen'  in  less 
than  a  week  and  sold  it  for  a  small  sum,  only  to  see 
it  performed  all  over  the  United  States  year  after 
year  to  crowded  houses. 

When  I  met  him  he  had  given  up  journalism  for 
play-writing,  having  provide'd  W.  J.  Florence,  John 
T.  Raymond  and  Marie  Aimee  with  unpretending 
pieces  that  long  retained  the  favor  of  the  public. 
Thus  when  I  became  his  friend  his  varied  experience 
had  given  him  a  far  more  intimate  acquaintance 
with  stage-craft  than  I  had  had,  altho  my  own  in- 
terest in  the  theory  of  the  theater  was  wider  than 
his. 

He  came  to  me  one  day  with  a  proposal  to  write 
a  play  for  John  Raymond,  who  had  previously 
produced  a  piece  of  his,  'In  Paradise,'  and  who  had 
never  produced  my  'Touch  and  Go.'  Jessop  sug- 
gested that  the  play  should  be  called  'A  Gold  Mine,' 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING    333 

and  that  it  should  present  Raymond  as  absolutely 
out  of  money  and  yet  trying  to  sell  a  gold  mine.  On 
that  hint  I  spoke,  suggesting  that  we  should  plan 
a  piece  a  little  more  ambitious  than  a  farce-melo- 
drama of  the  'In  Paradise'  type  and  that  we  should 
so  construct  our  story  that  the  actor  might  have 
occasion  to  exercise  his  power  of  pathos. 

When  E.  A.  Sothern  took  'Our  American  Cousin* 
over  to  Paris  in  1867  that  he  might  astonish  the 
French  with  his  superbly  caricatural  Dundreary, 
Raymond  had  appeared  as  Asa  Trenchard,  playing 
with  beautiful  simplicity  the  pathetic  scene  in  which 
he  destroys  the  will  which  gives  him  the  money  that 
otherwise  would  go  to  the  woman  he  loves,  using  the 
precious  document  to  light  his  cigar  while  he  is  talk- 
ing to  her.  Knowing  that  he  had  the  gift  of  pathos, 
Raymond  had  insisted  on  appearing  in  several 
serious  plays,  to  the  disgust  of  the  spectators  who  had 
come  to  see  him  in  the  expectation  of  laughter  and 
not  of  tears.  What  I  proposed  to  Jessop  was  that 
we  should  collaborate  in  a  comedy,  which  would 
provide  laughter  in  its  earlier  episodes  but  which 
would  also  draw  tears  when  the  audience  had  been 
duly  prepared  to  perceive  the  deeper  side  of  the 
hero's  nature.  The  play  in  which  we  carried  out 
this  plan  pleased  Raymond  immensely  and  he  pro- 
duced it  in  Memphis  on  Friday,  April  1,  1887.  He 
was  then  apparently  in  perfect  health;  yet  most 
unexpectedly  he  died  on  April  10. 

There  is  no  denying  that  this  was  a  sad  disappoint- 
ment to  the  two  dramatists.  They  were  soon  cheered 
by  an  application  for  the  play  from  Nat.  C.  Good- 


334  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

win,  who  was  weary  of  the  burlesques  and  the  farces 
in  which  he  had  been  appearing  and  who  believed 
that  he,  too,  could  personate  a  comic  character  with 
pathetic  moments.  We  had  to  wait  two  years  be- 
fore Goodwin  brought  'A  Gold  Mine'  to  New  York, 
where  it  was  acted  at  the  Fifth  Avenue  Theater 
on  March  4,  1889.  We  had  not  seen  Raymond's 
impersonation  of  the  character  we  had  composed 
for  him;  but  we  should  have  been  hard  to  please  if 
we  had  not  been  satisfied  by  the  commingled  humor 
and  sentiment  of  Goodwin's  performance,  the  first 
in  which  he  displayed  the  range  and  the  depth  of 
his  ability  as  an  actor.  Goodwin  continued  to 
appear  in  '  A  Gold  Mine '  for  several  years ;  and  after 
he  gave  it  up,  it  was  often  performed  by  stock 
companies  in  different  parts  of  the  country.  It  is 
still  popular  with  amateurs,  for  whose  benefit  it  has 
been  printed  in  the  inexpensive  yellow-backed  series 
of  'French's  Standard  Drama.' 

Shortly  after  the  play  was  acted  in  New  York, 
a  lady  sued  us  for  stealing  our  CA  Gold  Mine'  from 
her  'The  Gold  Mine.'  Fortunately  for  us  the 
single  performance  by  Raymond  in  Memphis  ante- 
dated the  only  performance  of  her  piece;  and  it  was 
easy  for  us  to  show  also  that  there  was  absolutely 
no  similarity  between  the  two  plays,  ours  being  a 
quiet  comedy  with  its  scene  laid  in  London,  while 
hers  was  a  noisy  melodrama,  the  action  of  which 
took  place  in  a  mining-camp  out  West. 

After  Goodwin  had  acquired  the  right  to  perform 
'A  Gold  Mine,'  Jessop  and  I  wrote  a  three-act  farce 
for  William  H.  Crane,  which  we  called  'On  Proba- 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING    335 

tion.'  When  it  was  produced  in  1889,  it  was  some- 
what overshadowed  by  the  superior  success  of  the 
'Senator,'  but  it  had  its  turn  later;  and  Crane  pre- 
sented it  off  and  on  for  two  or  more  years.  We 
collaborated  also  in  another  three-act  farce,  contrived 
specifically  for  the  Daly  quartet  —  John  Drew  and 
Ada  Rehan,  James  Lewis  and  Mrs.  Gilbert.  But 
Daly  was  not  taken  with  it  or  at  least  not  enough  to 
be  tempted  to  accept  it.  I  told  him  that  I  regretted 
this,  partly  because  I  was  very  desirous  of  profiting 
by  observing  his  methods  of  rehearsing  a  play. 
"Oh,  but  I  shouldn't  let  you  in !"  he  returned.  He 
did  not  care  to  have  his  autocratic  stage-directing 
interfered  with  even  by  the  authors  of  the  piece 
under  rehearsal.  What  Daly  rejected,  Daniel  Froh- 
man  immediately  accepted,  supporting  his  good 
opinion  of  the  piece  by  making  us  a  payment  in 
advance  of  the  royalties  we  expected  it  to  earn  for 
us.  Here  again  we  were  disappointed,  for  our  play 
was  frankly  farcical,  and  the  more  often  Frohman 
read  it  and  the  more  familiar  its  entangled  intrica- 
cies became  to  him  the  less  funny  he  found  it;  and 
if  a  farce  is  not  funny  it  is  a  thing  of  naught.  Here 
I  venture  to  think  that  he  erred  in  not  abiding  by 
his  first  impression,  because  that  would  probably 
be  the  impression  also  of  the  spectators  beholding 
the  play  for  the  first  time  —  and  very  likely  for  the 
only  time,  since  we  rarely  care  to  revisit  a  farce,  the 
interest  of  which  must  reside  mainly  in  the  complexity 
of  its  comic  complications. 


336  THESE   MANY  YEARS 


For  a  charity  performance  arranged  by  one  of 
my  friends  I  wrote  a  little  one-act  comedy,  'This 
Picture  and  That, '  which  was  represented  by  Henry 
Miller  and  Matilde  Madison  at  the  Lyceum  Theater 
on  April  15,  1887,  and  which  is  still  occasionally 
acted.  Mrs.  Fiske  used  it  as  a  curtain-raiser  during 
one  of  her  tours ;  and  it  wTas  the  play  in  which  Blanche 
Bates  made  her  first  appearance  on  the  stage.  I  had 
been  accused  of  plagiarism  in  'Margery's  Lovers' 
and  in  '  A  Gold  Mine, '  and  I  had  found  it  very  easy 
to  show  that  the  charge  was  baseless ;  but  if  a  similar 
accusation  had  been  brought  against  'This  Picture 
and  That,'  my  defense  would  have  been  more  difficult, 
altho  I  was  wholly  unconscious  of  any  utilization  of 
another  man's  ideas.  Shortly  after  my  playlet 
was  performed  I  went  to  see  Bronson  Howard's 
'Henrietta'  and  I  remarked  that  the  author  gave 
credit  to  'Vanity  Fair'  for  suggesting  to  him  a  situa- 
tion in  the  third  act.  When  the  curtain  fell  after 
that  act  I  was  able  to  perceive,  altho  not  very  dis- 
tinctly, the  situation  Bronson  Howard  had  bor- 
rowed; and  to  my  dismay  I  recognized  it  as  the 
same  situation  around  which  I  had  built  'This  Pic- 
ture and  That.'  I  had  believed,  and  in  fact  I  still 
believe,  that  I  had  invented  this  situation  myself; 
but  I  cannot  deny  that  Thackeray  had  used  it  first 
in  a  novel  which  I  had  react  and  reread.  This  ex- 
perience of  my  own  makes  me  think  it  probable 
that  Thackeray,  when  he  described  the  death-bed  of 


ADVENTURES  IN   PLAY-MAKING    337 

Colonel  Newcome,  had  forgotten  the  last  words  and 
dying  speech  of  Leatherstocking. 

I  wrote  another  one-act  comedy,  a  few  years  later, 
for  the  Theater  of  Arts  and  Letters,  an  enterprise 
which  Henry  B.  McDowell  carried  on  during  the 
winter  of  1892-3  and  which  was  intended  to  annul 
the  divorce  between  literature  and  the  drama  by 
coaxing  men  of  letters  into  turning  their  novels  into 
plays.  Of  course,  this  is  a  false  principle;  the  drama 
is  lifted  up  into  literature  only  when  the  men  of  the 
theater  develop  into  men  of  letters  without  ceasing 
to  be  practical  playwrights.  No  art  was  ever  bene- 
fited by  alluring  into  it  the  practitioners  of  another 
art.  If  any  art  is  ever  to  be  raised  to  a  loftier 
level  this  can  be  done  only  by  arousing  the  ambi- 
tion of  its  own  practitioners. 

The  so-called  Theater  of  Arts  and  Letters  gave  its 
performances  at  irregular  intervals  in  different  play- 
houses; I  followed  them  all  with  interest  and  with 
instruction.  The  presentation  of  Mary  E.  Wilkins' 
New  England  tragedy  'Giles  Corey'  and  of  Stock- 
ton's 'Squirrel  Inn'  revealed  that  these  two  adroit 
and  sincere  story-tellers  were  not  equipped  either 
with  the  technic  or  with  the  instinct  of  the  born 
play-maker.  Of  all  the  pieces  produced  by  Mc- 
Dowell only  three  really  held  the  attention  of  the 
friendly  audiences  which  came  together  month  after 
month  in  the  vain  hope  of  a  new  revelation.  These 
were  all  one-act  plays,  and  they  were  all  from  the 
pens  of  men  more  or  less  professionally  familiar  with 
stage-craft.  One  was  the  'Other  Woman'  by  Rich- 
ard Harding  Davis.  Another  was  'Harvest'  by 


338  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

Clyde  Fitch,  afterward  utilized  by  him  as  the  cen- 
tral act  of  the  'Moth  and  the  Flame.'  And  the 
third  was  my  own  'Decision  of  the  Court,'  produced 
on  March  23,  1893,  in  a  little  theater  up-stairs  on 
the  corner  of  Broadway  and  Twenty-ninth  Street. 
As  the  heroine,  who  until  the  court  has  decided, 
does  not  know  whether  she  is  married  or  unmar- 
ried, Agnes  Booth  was  as  brilliant  as  she  had  been 
in  the  'Silent  System.'  It  was  a  delight  to  observe 
her  certainty  of  execution  and  to  hear  her  trained 
voice  with  its  perfect  clarity  and  its  exquisite  mod- 
ulation. 


VI 

In  the  fall  of  1898  I  was  asked  if  I  could  not  find 
a  historic  character  around  which  to  write  a  play  for 
William  H.  Crane.  Not  long  before  I  had  seen  the 
actor's  vigorous  portrayal  of  Sir  Anthony  Absolute, 
and  this  prompted  me  to  believe  that  he  would  be 
a  picturesque  impersonator  of  Peter  Stuyvesant  as 
Irving  had  drawn  the  old  governor  in  the  veracious 
'History  of  Diedrich  Knickerbocker.'  This  sugges- 
tion was  tempting  to  the  comedian,  who  perceived 
specially  the  humorous  possibilities  of  the  old 
governor's  wooden  leg.  I  began  by  reading  up,  and 
I  decided  to  invent  a  conspiracy  of  the  British  to 
seize  New  Amsterdam  by  surprise  two  years  before 
the  actual  capture  of  the  city,  a  conspiracy  to  be 
foiled  by  the  firmness  of  Stuyvesant.  I  had  so  far 
developed  my  plot  as  to  see  how  I  could  introduce 
three  different  love-stories,  when  word  was  brought 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING    339 

me  that  Bronson  Howard  might  be  willing  to  col- 
laborate with  me.  He  was  an  old  friend  of  mine  for 
whom  I  already  had  the  highest  regard  both  as  a 
man  and  as  a  dramatist;  so  I  went  to  see  him  as 
soon  as  I  could. 

He  agreed  to  join  me  in  writing  the  play  on  two 
conditions.  The  first  was  that  the  resulting  piece 
should  be  announced  as  by  Brander  Matthews  and 
Bronson  Howard  and  not  as  by  Bronson  Howard  and 
Brander  Matthews.  Against  this  I  protested,  since 
he  was  the  older  and  the  better  soldier  and  his  name 
ought,  therefore,  to  precede  mine.  He  was  inex- 
orable; and  as  the  play  was  not  to  be  his  exclusive 
work,  he  insisted  on  signing  his  name  after  mine. 
After  a  vain  debate  I  yielded,  altho  I  was  still  un- 
convinced of  the  soundness  of  his  position.  Then  he 
stated  his  second  condition  —  that  the  material  I 
had  already  gathered  should  seem  to  him  promising. 
I  outlined  the  conspiracy,  the  three  love-stories,  the 
group  of  subordinate  characters  devised  to  supply 
a  background  of  the  conditions  of  life  in  New  Am- 
sterdam two  centuries  ago;  and  to  my  great  grati- 
fication he  expressed  his  complete  satisfaction. 

We  made  a  formal  contract  with  each  other  and 
another  with  Crane;  then  we  set  to  work  immediately 
to  invent  the  intricate  details  of  the  conspiracy  and 
to  construct  the  plot  of  the  play  with  Stuyvesant  as 
its  dominating  figure.  Howard  had  already  written 
one  play  for  Crane,  the  'Henrietta,'  and  I  had 
written  another,  'On  Probation,'  so  we  knew  by 
personal  experience  the  wide  range  of  the  comedian's 
professional  ability.  We  were  both  of  us  aware  that 


340  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

he  had  authority,  one  of  the  indispensable  elements 
of  an  actor's  equipment.  We  had  both  discovered 
that  altho  his  popularity  rested  on  his  capacity  as  a 
comedian,  he  had  dignity,  intensity,  and  pathos, 
all  qualifications  we  determined  to  utilize.  We 
began  work  together  the  first  week  in  January 
and  our  play  was  delivered  to  the  actor  early  in  the 
summer.  An  excellent  company  was  engaged  for 
it;  and  after  a  week  in  Providence  it  was  produced 
at  the  Star  Theater  in  New  York  on  October  2, 
1899.  It  did  not  achieve  the  success  for  which  we 
had  hoped. 

It  is  always  idle  to  try  to  explain  away  a  failure, 
but  after  the  lapse  of  nearly  a  score  of  years  I  think 
I  can  spy  out  the  reasons  why  our  comedy-drama  was 
a  disappointment.  The  complexity  of  the  conspir- 
acy was  a  little  too  cumbrous,  and  already  a  little 
old-fashioned  in  its  theatrical  machinery.  Then 
we  had  treated  the  culmination  of  the  third  act 
tragically  instead  of  pathetically,  because  we  knew 
that  Crane  was  a  master  of  tragic  intensity.  But 
this  was  a  blunder,  since  we  did  not  count  on  the 
predilections  and  prejudices  of  the  spectators,  who 
were  disconcerted  by  the  grim  power  unexpectedly 
visible  in  a  comedian.  An  audience  is  always  glad 
when  a  comic  actor  reveals  himself  possessed  of 
pathos;  but  they  are  taken  aback  when  they  are 
invited  to  applaud  him  as  a  tragedian,  however 
brief  and  infrequent  these  tragic  moments  may  be. 

The  fault  was  not  the  actor's,  for  he  rose  to  the 
height  of  the  situation  we  had  given  him.  No 
authors  could  have  asked  for  a  more  masterly  de,- 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING    341 

% 

lineation  of  the  character  they  had  conceived.  The 
failure  was  ours,  not  his.  We  had  also  made  another 
miscalculation.  We  knew  what  the  actor  was  capa- 
ble of  doing,  so  we  had  not  called  upon  him  to  reveal 
qualities  he  had  never  before  displayed.  But  we 
had  done  this  because  we  were  old  playgoers  long 
familiar  with  his  equipment,  but  we  failed  to  con- 
sider that  the  younger  generation  knew  him  chiefly 
as  a  funmaker  in  farces,  like  'On  Probation/  and 
could  not  recall  the  stern  veracity  he  had  exhib- 
ited in  the  'Henrietta.'  The  audience  which  gath- 
ered to  see  'Peter  Stuyvesant'  came  in  expectation 
of  laughter  and  of  laughter  only;  and  before  word 
could  get  to  the  other  possible  spectators  who  would 
have  relished  our  more  varied  reproduction  of  the 
days  of  the  Dutch,  the  career  of  the  play  had  been 
brought  to  an  end. 

To  me  the  memory  of  my  collaboration  with  Bron- 
son  Howard  is  most  grateful.  He  was  the  most  con- 
siderate of  partners;  —  indeed,  Augustus  Thomas 
quaintly  explained  the  non-success  of  our  play  by 
saying  that  "the  collaborators  had  probably  been  too 
polite  to  each  other" !  Polite  Bronson  Howard 
could  not  fail  to  be,  but  he  was  firm  always  in  insist- 
ing on  that  which  he  believed  to  be  best.  The 
dramatists,  like  all  other  craftsmen,  work  by  native 
instinct  mainly ;  and  they  do  their  work  by  reason  of 
an  intuitive  endowment  for  their  special  art.  Only 
a  few  of  them  are  intelligent  enough  and  thoughtful 
enough  to  be  able  to  deduce  the  principles  which 
have  guided  their  practice.  Bronson  Howard  was 
one  of  the  few  who  knew  why  he  did  what  he  did  and 


342  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

who  could  always  give  a  good  reason  for  what  he  had 
done.  It  is  impossible  for  me  to  overestimate  the 
profit  I  derived  from  being  taken  into  his  workshop; 
and  when  I  came  later  to  analyze  the  processes  of 
Moliere  and  of  Shakspere  as  playwrights  pure  and 
simple,  I  found  myself  constantly  aided  by  what  I 
had  picked  up  from  the  practice  and  the  precepts 
of  Bronson  Howard. 


VII 

As  I  look  back  over  my  experiences  as  a  play- 
wright, I  do  not  see  that  I  have  any  reason  to  be  dis- 
satisfied. Of  the.  six  plays  of  mine  which  have  been 
produced  in  New  York,  I  was  disappointed  only  by 
'Peter  Stuyvesant'  and  'Margery's  Lovers.'  The 
two  one-act  pieces  had  almost  as  large  a  measure  of 
success  as  is  possible  to  that  unpopular  form,  which 
no  longer  has  a  place  in  the  economy  of  the  modern 
stage.  'A  Gold  Mine'  and  'On  Probation'  attained 
a  wider  and  a  more  enduring  popularity  than  I  had 
hoped  for;  —  quite  possibly  they  succeeded  beyond 
their  deserts. 

If  I  have  not  established  myself  as  a  dramatist, 
consolidating  a  reputation  as  a  playwright  by  a 
constant  succession  of  plays  one  following  the  other, 
year  after  year,  there  are  two  explanations  to  be 
advanced,  either  of  them  adequate  alone  and  the 
two  together  being  unanswerable.  The  first  is  that 
whatever  the  value  of  my  theatrical  wares,  I  was 
never  a  pushing  or  a  plausible  sales-agent  for  them. 
They  had  to  sell  solely  on  their  own  merits,  and  I 


ADVENTURES  IN  PLAY-MAKING    343 

was  devoid  of  the  necessary  persistency  of  the  com- 
mercial traveller  who  knows  just  where  and  just  how 
to  place  his  goods.  I  could  not  incessantly  vaunt 
what  I  had  to  sell  to  those  who  were  in  the  mar- 
ket for  plays  —  actors,  actor-managers,  and  man- 
agers. There  is  an  indisputable  truth  in  a  remark 
I  once  heard  from  the  lips  of  a  successful  play- 
wright: "Any  fool  can  write  a  play  —  but  it  takes 
a  clever  man  to  get  the  play  acted." 

The  second  is  that  even  if  I  myself  held  play- 
making  to  be  my  vocation,  those  whom  I  approached 
always  supposed  that  it  was  only  an  avocation. 
For  this  supposition  there  was  not  a  little  war- 
rant, since  I  was  known  to  be  writing  short-stories 
and  novels,  essays  and  criticisms.  I  was  regarded 
as  a  man  of  letters  rather  than  as  a  man  of  the 
theater.  Nor  can  I  deny  that  I  failed  to  give  to 
the  drama  the  single-hearted  devotion  that  it  de- 
mands. The  art  of  the  playwright  brooks  no  rival 
and  it  is  tolerant  of  only  one  competitor,  the  art  of 
the  actor.  And  especially  is  it  hostile  to  the  art  to 
which  I  came  in  time  to  take  an  almost  equal  in- 
terest, the  art  of  criticism.  Many  an  actor  and  many 
a  novelist  has  been  also  a  playwright.  But  Less- 
ing  is  the  only  dramatic  critic  who  has  ever  proved 
his  power  himself  to  practise  what  he  preached  to 
others.  Perhaps  I  ought  to  qualify  this  statement 
by  saying  that  Lessing  was  the  only  professed 
dramatic  critic  who  succeeded  also  as  a  dramatist, 
until  a  century  later  when  Jules  Lemaitre  repeated 
the  feat.  It  is  not  strictly  true,  of  course,  that 
"the  critics  are  those  who  have  failed  in  literature 


344  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

and  in  art";  yet  it  is  true  that  the  critic  who  has 
himself  attempted  the  art  is  likely  to  be  more  com- 
petent, to  have  a  keener  insight  into  its  principles 
and  its  practices,  its  traditions  and  its  technic,  than 
the  critic  who  has  never  adventured  himself  into  the 
studio  and  the  stage. 


CHAPTER  XV 
AMONG  THE  PLAYERS 


DURING  one  of  my  talks  with  Eugene  Nus 
in  Paris,  in  1873,  he  said  to  me  that  if  I 
wanted  to  write  for  the  stage  I  ought  to 
go  to  the  theater  frequently  —  si  vous  voulez  faire 
du  theatre,  il  faut  y  oiler  souvent.  I  recognized  the 
advice  as  excellent;  but  I  knew  also  that  I  did  not 
need  it,  since  I  had  been  a  most  assiduous  playgoer 
from  my  youth  up,  as  I  have  abundantly  testified 
in  these  chapters.  My  parents  liked  the  theater 
themselves,  and  even  when  I  was  only  a  young  boy 
they  took  me  with  them  to  see  Edwin  Booth  as  Rich- 
elieu and  as  Hamlet  during  his  successive  engage- 
ments at  the  Winter  Garden  in  1864  and  1865. 
When  I  returned  from  Paris  at  the  age  of  fifteen  I 
was  soon  allowed  to  go  to  the  theater  by  myself. 
I  still  accompanied  my  parents  when  they  went, 
but  as  they  were  less  eager  for  the  drama  than  I  was 
I  saw  many  performances  that  did  not  attract 
them.  While  I  was  in  college  and  at  the  law  school 
I  became  "a  regular  first-nighter,"  as  the  phrase  is; 
and  there  were  then  so  few  theaters  in  New  York 
that  attendance  at  all  first  performances  was  possible 
and  not  arduous.  Even  if  this  self-imposed  duty 

345 


346  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

had  been  strenuous  I  should  have  done  my  best  to 
accomplish  it,  as  my  appetite  for  the  stage  was 
insatiable  —  so  insatiable  that  more  than  once  I 
have  attended  five  or  six  performances  in  a  single 
week. 

I  think  it  safe  to  say  that  I  have  seen  almost 
everything  that  was  worth  seeing  in  the  theaters 
of  New  York  in  the  half-century  which  elapsed 
between  1865  and  1915,  altho  I  ceased  to  be  a 
regular  first-nighter  long  before  the  end  of  this  period, 
limiting  my  visits  to  the  theater  to  those  performances 
which  I  had  reason  to  believe  would  repay  me.  In 
the  course  of  these  years  there  are  favorite  plays 
that  I  have  seen  a  score  of  times  —  indeed,  I  think 
that  I  must  have  witnessed  ' As  You  Like  It'  and  the 
'School  for  Scandal'  nearer  forty  times  than  twenty. 
I  can  call  a  long  roll  of  Rosalinds  wandering  blithely 
thru  the  woods  of  Arden  —  Mrs.  Scott-Siddons, 
Fanny  Davenport,  Helena  Modjeska,  Ada  Caven- 
dish, Lillie  Langtry,  Rose  Coghlan,  Mary  Anderson, 
Ada  Rehan,  Julia  Marlowe,  Margaret  Anglin,  Edith 
Wynne  Matthison;  and  it  would  be  hard  to  make 
a  final  choice  out  of  this  bevy  of  beauties.  I  recol- 
lect Mrs.  Scott-Siddons  as  thin  and  fragile,  and  Ada 
Cavendish  as  bouncing  and  meretricious.  Fanny 
Davenport  filled  the  eye  with  her  glowing  loveliness 
of  face  and  figure,  and  she  gave  to  Rosalind  her 
own  high  spirits;  but  captivating  as  was  her  deline- 
ation of  the  most  delightful  of  Shakspere's  women, 
it  lacked  poetry;  and  poetry,  ineffable  grace  and 
youth  and  springtime  joy  it  was  that  Mary  Ander- 
son suggested.  A  similar  womanliness,  evasive  and 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  347 

tantalizing,  characterized  Ada  Rehan  in  this  part. 
In  technical  skill,  in  clearness  of  conception,  and  in 
certainty  of  execution  Modjeska's  Rosalind  was  in- 
comparable, yet  it  was  foreign,  it  had  not  the  at- 
mosphere of  England;  and  I  knew  exactly  what 
Bunner  meant  when  he  declared  that  Modjeska's 
performance  would  be  "simply  perfect  —  if  one 
could  first  admit  that  Rosalind  was  really  a  pretty 
French  widow"  ! 

Before  leaving  this  romantic  comedy,  so  real  even 
tho  it  is  laid  in  a  realm  of  fantasy  and  so  lyric  even 
tho  it  has  less  verse  and  more  prose  in  proportion 
than  is  customary  in  Shakspere's  lighter  pieces,  I 
must  chronicle  the  performance  of  ( As  You  Like  It' 
in  1893  by  the  Professional  Woman's  League,  in 
which  every  part  was  taken  by  a  woman,  a  strange 
transformation  for  a  play  every  part  in  which  had 
been  taken  by  a  man  when  it  had  been  originally 
acted  nearly  three  centuries  earlier  by  the  company 
wherein  Shakspere  himself  was  an  actor-manager. 
This  manifestation  of  feminism  in  the  drama  was 
made  significant  to  me  by  the  sturdy  impersona- 
tion of  Orlando  by  Mary  Shaw  and  by  the  elocu- 
tionary effort  of  the  aging  Janauschek  as  Jaques. 

The  'School  for  Scandal'  I  must  have  seen  as 
often  as  'As  You  Like  It,'  and  the  'Rivals'  almost  as 
frequently.  Yet  I  have  never  seen  either  of  Sheri- 
dan's comedies  with  a  cast  that  completely  satisfied 
me.  Despite  the  liberties  he  took  with  the  text,  the 
excision  of  the  supersentimental  Julia  and  Falkland, 
the  amplification  of  Bob  Acres,  all  to  my  mind 
perfectly  justifiable,  the  'Rivals'  as  Jefferson  chose 


348  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

to  have  it  performed  was  a  rich  and  satisfying 
presentation.  His  own  Bob  Acres  was  a  humorous 
masterpiece,  even  if  there  was  justice  in  William 
Warren's  gibe  that  Jefferson  presented  the  ' Rivals' 
with  "Sheridan  twenty  miles  away."  Mrs.  John 
Drew  5s  Mrs.  Malaprop  was  perfection  itself,  infinitely 
superior  to  that  presented  in  London  almost  simul- 
taneously by  Mrs.  Sterling.  Mrs.  Drew  gave  point 
to  every  one  of  her  incessant  dislocations  of  the 
vocabulary  by  the  evident  pride  she  took  in  that 
particular  derangement  of  epitaphs.  Mrs.  Sterling 
emphasized  every  verbal  blunder  as  tho  she  were 
fully  conscious  of  its  enormity;  she  seemed  to  be 
saying,  as  she  stood  throwing  her  contorted  phrases 
straight  in  the  faces  of  the  spectators:  "There,  I'm 
Mrs.  Malaprop,  and  this  is  a  malapropism,  and  I 
do  hope  you  will  see  it  and  roar  at  it !" 

John  Gilbert  was  the  finest  and  the  firmest  of  Sir 
Anthonys,  as  he  was  the  final  expression  of  Sir 
Peter;  and  William  H.  Crane  was  as  vigorous  and 
as  humorous  as  any  Sir  Anthony  I  ever  beheld, 
excepting  only  John  Gilbert.  But  as  Sir  Lucius 
O'Trigger  neither  William  J.  Florence  or  Nat.  C. 
Goodwin,  actors  of  far  more  mimetic  power  and  of 
a  far  wider  versatility,  ever  equalled  John  Brougham, 
who  found  in  Sheridan's  Irish  gentleman  the  one 
character  in  all  his  long  stage  career  in  which  he  had 
simply  to  suggest  himself  —  or  at  least  in  which  he 
had  seemingly  not  to  assume  a  part  but  merely  to 
be  what  he  was.  This  is  not  the  only  instance,  even 
if  it  is  the  most  salient,  in  my  playgoing  experience, 
when  I  have  found  an  actor  of  no  special  ability 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  349 

extraordinarily  effective  in  some  one  part  which  he 
appeared  to  be  born  to  play. 

I  must  have  seen  almost  as  many  Lady  Teazles  as 
I  have  Rosalinds;  and  yet  far  fewer  linger  in  my 
memory  as  having  succeeded  brilliantly  in  that  most 
brilliant  part,  which,  sparkling  as  it  is,  does  not  carry 
the  actress  so  completely  as  the  simpler,  more  femi- 
nine, and  more  human  Rosalind.  When  I  run  down 
the  list  of  my  Lady  Teazles  —  Mrs.  D.  P.  Bowers 
and  Madeline  Henriques,  Mrs.  Hoey  and  Mrs.  Lang- 
try,  Rose  Eytinge  and  Rose  Coghlan,  Fanny  Daven- 
port and  Ada  Rehan,  Sara  Jewett  and  Annie  Russell, 
Lady  Bancroft  and  Winifred  Emory  —  I  am  again 
inclined  to  pick  out  Fanny  Davenport  as  the  one,  on 
the  whole,  most  satisfying;  perhaps  this  is  because 
I  was  very  young  when  I  first  beheld  her  in  the 
radiancy  of  her  youthful  charm,  and  perhaps  because 
her  youth  and  her  beauty,  her  high  spirits  and  her 
enjoyment  of  life  made  me  credit  her  performance 
with  more  merit  than  it  had. 

Of  the  many  impersonators  of  the  more  smooth 
and  suave  Joseph  Surface  I  doubt  if  any  one  has  left 
a  more  decided  impression  on  my  memory  than  Louis 
James.  Of  the  many  actors  whom  I  have  seen  as 
his  careless  and  reckless  brother  Charles,  I  do  not 
know  whether  Charles  Wyndham  or  Charles  Coghlan 
gave  the  more  incisive  performance.  And  of  course 
I  have  never  seen,  nor  has  any  one  else  in  the  past 
half-century,  any  rendering  of  Sir  Peter  comparable 
with  John  Gilbert's.  This  was  totally  satisfying; 
there  was  no  possibility  in  the  part  that  Gilbert  did 
not  perceive  and  seize  and  bring  out;  and  I  doubt 


350  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

if  his  personation  of  the  character  was  ever  surpassed 
even  by  its  creator  at  the  original  production  at 
Drury  Lane  nearly  a  century  and  a  half  ago. 

John  Gilbert  still  played  the  screen  scene  in  accord 
with  the  tradition  which  had  been  handed  down  from 
Sheridan's  time,  a  tradition  now  abandoned  because 
of  the  amelioration  of  manners  and  the  development 
of  sympathy.  Sheridan  was  following  in  the  foot- 
steps of  the  Restoration  dramatists,  as  heartless  as 
they  were  witty,  so  there  is  no  warmth  of  senti- 
ment in  the  ( School  for  Scandal '  —  there  is  no  true 
love-scene,  not  even  between  Charles  and  Maria, 
the  only  pair  of  young  people  who  are  married  off  at 
the  end  of  the  piece.  The  tone  of  the  comedy  is 
hard  and  chilly;  it  glitters  like  an  icicle;  and  when 
the  screen  falls,  disclosing  Lady  Teazle  to  Sir  Peter, 
she  is  greatly  put  out  because  she  has  been  caught, 
and  he  is  hurt  in  his  pride  rather  than  in  his  heart. 
That  this  was  the  case  Gilbert  indicated  simply  and 
directly,  somehow  managing  to  convey  the  impres- 
sion that  his  face  flushed  and  then  paled. 

That  this  was  wholly  in  accord  with  the  intent  of 
Sheridan,  we  may  be  sure;  he  was  writing  a  satiric 
comedy,  not  a  play  of  sentiment.  But  nowadays 
we  demand  sentiment  even  in  satire;  and  therefore 
when  the  screen  falls,  Lady  Teazle  is  now  discovered 
dissolved  in  tears,  and  when  at  last  she  speaks, 
sobs  choke  her  utterance.  This  new  attitude  of  the 
actress  compels  her  husband  to  a  new  departure; 
so  Sir  Peter  in  his  turn  is  now  pathetic,  overlooking 
the  hurt  to  his  pride  in  his  consciousness  of  the  pain 
in  his  heart.  And  this  again  forces  another  change 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  351 

upon  the  performer  of  Charles,  whom  Sheridan  calls 
upon  to  laugh  at  Joseph  and  Sir  Peter  and  Lady 
Teazle,  to  flout  them  and  to  jeer  at  them  one  after 
another.  To  us  nowadays,  subdued  to  more  senti- 
mentalized moods,  this  conduct  of  Charles  would  be 
callous;  it  would  be  contrary  to  our  idea  as  to  the 
proper  conduct  of  a  gentleman;  it  would  rob  the 
actor  of  the  sympathy  of  the  audience.  So  it  is 
that  Charles,  while  he  may  still  jeer  at  Joseph  and 
even  at  Sir  Peter,  lets  his  flouting  fade  from  his 
lips  when  he  looks  back  at  the  repentant  figure  of 
Lady  Teazle,  like  Niobe  all  tears. 


n 

Nearly  forty  years  ago,  in  one  of  the  earliest  num- 
bers of  the  'Era  Almanack/  Shirley  Brooks,  then  the 
editor  of  Punch,  condensed  his  recollections  of  the 
interesting  performances  he  had  witnessed  into  a  list 
of  the  finest  moments  he  associated  with  the  names 
of  every  great  actor.  This  list  has  always  seemed  to 
me  to  have  more  significance  than  Shirley  Brooks 
suspected,  since  the  moment  which  rises  unbidden 
in  the  memory  of  a  trained  observer  at  the  name  of 
a  tragedian  or  a  comedian  is  likely  to  be  that  when 
the  performer  spoke  the  phrase  or  made  the  gesture 
or  assumed  the  attitude  which  was  emblematic  and 
symptomatic  of  his  special  talent.  It  would  help 
us  to  see  in  what  kind  of  part  he  had  been  most 
characteristically  effective;  and  I  am  therefore 
moved  to  make  out  a  similar  list  of  the  specific 


352  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

effects  which  have  most  deeply  etched  themselves 
on  my  memory.  I  have  already  recorded  the  intense 
impression  made  on  me  by  Charlotte  Cushman's 
"Be  husband  to  me,  heaven!"  as  Queen  Katharine 
in  'Henry  VIII,'  and  by  Fechter's  headsman-like 
attitude  in  the  final  act  of  'Ruy  Bias. ' 

From  Coquelin's  immense  gallery  it  is  very  difficult 
indeed  to  make  a  choice,  since  so  many  moments, 
so  different  one  from  the  other,  come  thronging  for- 
ward; but  I  think  I  am  justified  in  selecting  the 
expression  which  slowly  came  into  his  face  in  the 
'Etrangere'  of  the  younger  Dumas,  when  he  awak- 
ened at  last  to  the  fact  that  the  American  was  bent 
on  insulting  him.  And  by  the  side  of  this  I  should 
put  the  superb  conceit  of  Cyrano  as  he  improvises 
the  ballade  on  the  duel  that  he  is  actually  engaged 
in  fighting.  On  the  other  hand,  the  choice  from 
Joseph  Jefferson  is  easy,  since  it  appears  obvious 
that  I  must  cite  the  revived  Rip  Van  Winkle's  "Are 
we  then  so  soon  forgot?"  From  Ristori  I  should 
take  the  stiletto  look  with  which  as  Lucrezia  Borgia 
she  emphasized  the  name  of  the  husband  who  is 
jealous  arid  suspicious  and  threatening:  "Don 
Alfonso  d'Este,  my  third  husband!"  From  Duse 
I  cannot  but  set  down  here  the  expression  of  un- 
utterable woe  which  descended  upon  her  face  in 
'Cavalleria  Rusticana'  when  the  husband  thanked 
her  for  telling  him  that  her  lover  has  an  intrigue 
with  his  wife.  From  the  third  of  the  Italian  masters 
of  the  histrionic  art,  Salvini,  I  recall  most  vividly 
the  impulsive  casting  down  of  lago  with  the  foot 
raised  as  if  to  stamp  him  to  death.  It  is  a  gesture 


AMONG  THE   PLAYERS  353 

once  more  that  rises  before  me  now  when  I  seek 
to  evoke  the  most  characteristic  specimen  of  Sarah- 
Bernhardt's  novel  and  inventive  technic — the  suc- 
cessive jerks  of  feverish  impatience  with  which  Frou- 
frou tears  the  fringe  from  the  sofa-cushion  in  the 
big  scene  with  her  sister,  whose  unthinking  unself- 
ishness is  bringing  disaster  to  both  of  them. 

My  earliest  recollection  of  Booth  is  the  instant 
where  Richelieu  draws  the  awful  circle  of  the  church 
around  the  ward  he  is  protecting;  and  my  latest 
is  the  malignant  dance  of  Bertuccio  when  the  Fool 
believes  that  he  has  attained  his  Revenge.  Irving 
I  saw  first  in  Alberry's  once  blooming  but  now  long 
faded  'Two  Roses'  ;  I  can  still  hear  the  crisp 
utterance  which  accompanied  his  presentation  of 
"A  little  check!"  From  his  later  impersonations  I 
find  most  vivid  the  salient  profile  of  the  red  figure  of 
Mephistopheles  in  the  mad  revels  of  'Faust.'  Nor 
is  there  danger  of  erring  if  I  pick  out  for  Ellen  Terry 
the  sparkling  gaiety  of  her  Beatrice,  when  she  de- 
clares that  "a  star  danced,  and  under  that  I  was 
born."  So  it  is  not  difficult  for  me  to  declare  that 
what  I  recall  with  most  certainty  out  of  all  Mary 
Anderson's  poetic  impersonations  of  poetic  heroines 
is  the  grace  and  aban.don  of  Perdita's  entrancing 
dance  with  Florizel  in  the  springtime  of  their  young 
love.  Clara  Morris,  a  most  unequal  actress  of  rich 
native  gift  hampered  by  lack  of  taste  and  by  defects 
of  early  training,  gave  me  a  thrill  of  horror  when 
I  began  to  perceive  in  the  heroine  of  'Article  47' 
the  symptoms  of  incipient  insanity  which  she  man- 
aged somehow  to  convey  to  us  all  at  that  first  per- 


354  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

formance  by  a  slow  working  of  her  body  to  and 
fro  while  her  eyes  were  set  in  a  deadly  stare. 

From  the  repertory  of  Ludwig  Barnay,  the  most 
gifted  and  accomplished  German  actor  it  has  ever 
been  my  good  fortune  to  know,  I  could  not  but 
single  out  the  piercing  look  of  inquiry  with  which 
Mark  Antony  sizes  up  the  crowd  in  the  Forum  around 
Caesar's  body,  to  see  whether  it  is  time  for  him  to 
play  his  trump-card  and  to  produce  Caesar's  will. 
From  the  repertory  of  Mrs.  Fiske  I  should  take  the 
nervous  chill  of  Tess  of  the  D'Urbervilles  after  she 
returns  with  the  bloody  knife  in  her  hand.  From 
Agnes  Booth  I  should  have  to  give  the  whole  of  that 
long  soliloquy  in  the  'Engaged'  of  W.  S.  Gilbert,  a 
soliloquy  the  delivery  of  which  was  punctuated  by 
intermittent  biting  into  the  tart  she  was  slowly  de- 
vouring, a  soliloquy  so  long  that  Mrs.  Booth  broke  it 
into  three  and  hid  its  extreme  length  from  the  audi- 
ence, who  listened  to  it  with  the  keenest  enjoyment. 
And  I  may  end  by  adding  that  to  me  at  least  nothing 
that  Nat.  Goodwin  ever  did  was  truer  in  its  simplic- 
ity, more  unaffectedly  pathetic,  than  his  final  words 
as  the  curtain  fell  on  the  second  act  of  'A  Gold 
Mine':  "Well,  it  was  worth  it !" 

When  I  seek  to  set  by  the  side  of  these  single 
effects  of  individual  performers  a  corresponding  list 
of  performances  in  which  every  part  was  so  appro- 
priately played  that  the  total  impression  was  abso- 
lutely satisfying,  I  must  begin  by  leaving  out  a  dozen 
or  a  score  of  the  representations  of  the  Comedie- 
Frangaise  which  I  accept  as  impeccable  beyond  cavil. 
'Ruy  Bias'  with  Mounet-Sully  and  Coquelin  and 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  355 

Sarah-Bernhardt,  before  her  golden  voice  had  been 
worn  and  before  her  manner  had  degenerated  into 
mannerism  —  this  is  one  of  them;  and  another  is 
the  '  Etrangere '  with  the  splendor  of  its  original  cast, 
exceptionally  splendid  even  for  the  Frangais.  Far 
less  glittering  in  its  individual  impersonations  and 
yet  most  admirable  as  a  whole  was  'Julius  Caesar' 
by  the  Meiningen  company  as  I  beheld  it  at  Drury 
Lane  in  June,  1881,  with  Mark  Antony  impersonated 
by  Barnay,  about  whose  perfect  adaptation  to  the 
part  there  could  be  no  dispute. 

Of  performances  seen  in  America  I  am  inclined  to 
single  out  three.  The  first  in  point  of  time  is  the 
production  of  'Henry  V  by  Charles  Calvert  at 
Booth's  Theater,  with  George  Rignold  as  the  young 
King  and  with  all  the  host  of  character  parts  which 
give  variety  to  Shakspere's  loose- join  ted  and  undra- 
matic  history  vigorously  individualized.  The  sec- 
ond, again  in  chronological  order,  is  the  'Taming  of 
the  Shrew'  when  Hamilton  Bell  designed  the  cos- 
tumes and  when  Daly's  company  was  rich  in  comic 
actors  of  both  sexes,  headed  by  the  superb  quartet 
whose  team-play  was  unerring  —  Ada  Rehan,  John 
Drew,  James  Lewis,  and  Mrs.  Gilbert.  For  the  third 
and  last  I  must  choose  the  'Thunderbolt'  as  that 
piece  was  acted  by  the  company  of  the  New  Theater 
to  be  dissolved  forever  only  a  few  months  later.  I 
doubt  if  our  modern  stage  has  seen  any  modern  play 
more  artistically  performed  than  was  Pinero's  mas- 
terpiece under  the  direction  of  Winthrop  Ames,  or 
more  harmoniously  represented  in  all  its  quieter  details 
as  well  as  in  all  its  intensely  dramatic  moments. 


356  THESE   MANY  YEARS 


III 

A  performance  like  that  of  the  'Thunderbolt' 
at  the  New  Theater  in  1911,  reflects  high  credit  upon 
the  manager,  who  after  all  is  the  man  ultimately  re- 
sponsible for  it,  since  he  has  chosen  the  several 
members  of  the  company  and  has  selected  also 
the  stage-manager,  the  art-director,  and  all  the 
other  junior  officers  whose  combined  efficiency  makes 
possible  a  performance  as  perfect  as  this.  Few  of 
the  historians  of  dramatic  literature  in  the  past 
and  few  of  the  theatrical  critics  of  the  present  have 
perceived  the  immense  importance  of  the  manager, 
or  have  noted  how  few  managers  there  have  been  in 
the  theaters  of  Great  Britain  and  the  United  States 
who  have  impressed  their  individualities  upon  the 
drama.  The  manager  of  recognized  ability  is  far 
rarer  than  the  actor  or  the  dramatist  of  equal  equip- 
ment; and  actors  and  dramatists  of  high  repute 
have  failed  dismally  when  they  undertook  theatrical 
management.  David  Garrick,  successful  as  an  actor 
and  successful  as  a  dramatist,  was  triumphantly 
successful  also  as  manager,  whereas  Sheridan,  who 
succeeded  him  in  the  control  of  Drury  Lane,  was 
lamentably  unsuccessful.  Edwin  Booth  built  a  the- 
ater for  himself  in  New  York  and,  from  lack  of  busi- 
ness capacity,  he  allowed  it  to  slip  from  his  lax  con- 
trol. 

On  the  other  hand,  Augustin  Daly  had  a  manage- 
rial career  of  more  than  thirty  years,  full  of  vicissi- 
tudes, no  doubt,  broken  in  the  middle  by  failure,  and 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  357 

yet  filled  with  valiant  effort,  strongly  individual,  and 
incessantly  interesting.  I  was  a  friendly  spectator 
of  the  whole  of  Daly's  managerial  struggles,  in  at 
least  four  different  playhouses  in  New  York;  I  even 
chanced  to  witness  certain  of  his  ambitious  forays 
into  foreign  countries.  For  instance,  I  was  present 
at  the  Vaudeville  Theater  in  August,  1891,  when  he 
permitted  the  Parisians  to  gaze  in  amused  amaze- 
ment at  'As  You  Like  It,'  probably  the  first  time  that 
Shakspere's  comedy  had  ever  been  acted  in  English 
in  the  French  capital.  And  I  had  previously  been 
one  of  the  friendly  Americans  in  London  in  July, 
1884,  when  he  first  introduced  his  company  to  the 
British  public,  an  occasion  on  which  I  was  enabled 
to  calculate  the  time-reaction  of  Londoners  toward 
an  American  joke.  The  piece  was,  so  I  seem  to  re- 
call, 'Seven  Twenty -Eight,'  or  one  of  Daly's  other 
free  Americanizations  of  German  farces,  and  as  it 
was  familiar  to  most  of  us  American  visitors  to  Lon- 
don, our  laughs  followed  swift  upon  the  utterance  of 
every  merry  jest  on  the  stage;  then  there  would  be 
a  brief  interval  of  silence;  and  finally  the  main 
body  of  the  British  audience  apprehended  the  exotic 
joke  and  laughed  in  platoons. 

Daly  had  his  own  views  about  everything,  and  he 
insisted  on  carrying  them  out.  He  did  not  hesitate 
to  rearrange  Sheridan  and  Shakspere  to  accord  with 
his  own  whim.  His  taste  was  often  at  fault  and  his 
judgment  was  sometimes  at  sea;  but  no  man  ever 
lived  who  was  more  intensely  absorbed  by  his  special 
art.  He  lived  in  the  theater  and  for  the  theater; 
and  as  a  direct  consequence  of  this,  what  he  did  in 


358  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

the  theater  was  unfailingly  interesting,  even  when 
it  was  most  wrong-headed.  He  had  inexhaustible 
energy  and  boundless  ambition.  He  hoped  to  make 
his  theater  an  American  equivalent  of  the  Comedie- 
Frangaise,  with  a  permanent  company  and  a  reper- 
tory of  standard  comedies  in  stock  and  always  on 
hand.  For  several  winters  he  had  subscription 
Tuesdays,  at  which  the  same  audiences  gathered 
week  after  week.  He  always  sent  me  invitations 
for  these  performances;  and  he  often  also  sent  me 
a  complimentary  pass  for  the  season,  admitting  me 
whenever  I  might  care  to  drop  in. 

He  liked  to  celebrate  himself  or  at  least  to  cele- 
brate the  company  of  comedians  whom  he  kept  to- 
gether year  after  year;  and  in  1887  he  asked  me  to 
aid  him  in  editing  'A  Portfolio  of  Players,'  to  contain 
a  score  of  photogravure  portraits  in  character  of  his 
leading  performers,  for  which  Hutton  and  Bunner, 
William  Winter  and  I  prepared  vignettes  of  apprecia- 
tion and  for  which  Bunner  rimed  a  witty  epistle  to 
'A  Playgoer  of  the  Twentieth  Century,'  a  copy  of 
verses  appropriately  serving  as  an  epilog.  In  the 
course  of  our  meetings  to  arrange  this  volume  he 
said  to  Hutton  suddenly:  "How  is  it  that  I  haven't 
seen  you  at  the  theater  lately?"  Hutton  explained 
that  he  had  married  and  that  he  found  it  therefore 
more  expensive  to  go  to  the  play.  "But  didn't  I 
send  you  a  season  ticket?"  Daly  inquired.  :'Yes," 
Hutton  responded,  "but  I'd  pay  for  four  seats  any 
time  rather  than  face  your  father-in-law  with  a  pass 
in  my  hand." 

Daly  laughed,  for  he  knew  John  Duffs  detestation 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  359 

of  all  deadheads,  which  was  perhaps  the  reason 
why  he  had  stationed  his  father-in-law  by  the  side 
of  the  ticket-taker.  The  story  is  told  that  a  lively 
little  man  once  asked  for  a  pass  and  was  referred  to 
Duff,  whose  huge  bulk  towered  on  the  top  of  the 
steps  behind  the  railing.  "Mr.  Duff,  do  you  pass 
the  profession  ?  "  was  the  lively  little  man's  question. 
To  this  Duff  responded  with  another  query:  "And 
what  might  be  your  connection  with  the  profession  ?" 
Whereupon  the  lively  little  man  proclaimed  himself 
to  be  "the  lightning  ticket-seller  down  to  Barnum's 
circus!"  Duff  looked  down  on  him  and  then 
pointed  to  the  box-office,  saying:  "Then  let  me  see 
how  quick  you  can  buy  one !" 

Here  occasion  serves  for  a  personal  explanation. 
At  least  I  claim  the  right  to  interrupt  my  own  narra- 
tive by  rising  to  a  question  of  privilege.  There  is 
now  in  circulation  an  anecdote  which  has  somehow 
attached  itself  to  my  name  to  the  effect  that  I  once 
attended  the  first  performance  of  a  play  on  the  in- 
vitation of  its  author.  Perhaps  I  had  better  cite 
the  rest  of  the  story  from  the  Liverpool  newspaper 
where  I  last  saw  it.  "At  the  end  of  the  first  act 
there  was  a  chilly  silence  among  the  audience,  but 
Mr.  Matthews  applauded,  as  in  duty  bound.  At 
the  end  of  the  second  act  the  audience  hissed,  while 
Mr.  Matthews  kept  a  troubled  silence.  At  the  end 
of  the  third  act  Mr.  Matthews  went  out  and  paid 
for  his  seat,  and  came  back  and  hissed  with  the 
rest."  Now  this  is  a  good  story  and  I  regret  that 
I  have  no  right  to  appear  as  the  ingenious  hero.  I 
cordially  agree  with  the  late  Adrian  Joline,  the 


360  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

autograph  collector,  that  "jokes  ought  to  be  regis- 
tered, so  as  not  to  be  transferable  to  bearer." 

I  was  a  witness  also  of  the  managerial  career  of 
A.  M.  Palmer,  who  resigned  the  librarianship  of  the 
Mercantile  Library  to  take  charge  of  the  Union 
Square  Theater,  going  on  later  to  the  Madison  Square 
and  finally  to  Wallack's.  And  I  observed  with  an 
even  acuter  interest  the  rise  of  Harrigan  and  Hart, 
who  came  forward  first  with  a  song-and -dance  at 
the  Theatre  Comique,  and  who  slowly  and  steadily 
broadened  the  scope  of  their  little  act,  until  the 
*  Mulligan  Guards'  Parade'  was  in  due  season  suc- 
ceeded by  'Squatter  Sovereignty,'  which  survives 
in  my  memory  as  Harrigan 's  best  play,  the  one  in 
which  he  most  satisfactorily  revealed  the  possibili- 
ties of  the  special  kind  of  piece  he  had  devised  in 
the  course  of  years  of  experiment.  He  recruited 
his  company  from  the  variety-shows,  from  the  per- 
formers who  were  accustomed  to  present  fixed 
types,  the  stock  Irishman,  the  stock  German,  the 
stock  Chinaman,  the  stock  negro.  Then  he  called 
upon  these  actors  of  limited  range  to  bring  out 
more  sharply  the  differences  in  character  which 
exist  within  the  stock-type.  Harrigan  not  only  had 
a  keen  eye  for  character,  as  he  had  studied  it  in  the 
tenement-house  neighborhoods,  he  was  also  a  most 
skilful  stage-manager.  No  one  who  ever  saw  the  sep- 
arate entrances  of  the  clan  Murphy  and  of  the  clan 
Macintyre  in  'Squatter  Sovereignty'  can  forget  the 
delicate  discrimination  of  these  two  groups  of  Amer- 
icanized Hibernians. 

Here  was  acting  of  a  delightful  kind  within  its 
rigid  limitations;  no  wonder  it  won  high  commenda- 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  361 

tion  from  Howells,  among  other  critics.  This  hugely 
disgusted  John  Gilbert,  who  once  expressed  to  me 
the  surprise  of  a  highly  trained  actor  that  these 
variety-show  impersonations  of  fixed  types  should 
be  so  warmly  praised  for  their  restricted  art. 
Coquelin  was  more  open-minded;  and  when  I  asked 
him  in  1888,  on  his  first  visit  to  America,  to  see 
Harrigan  in  'Waddy  Googan,'  he  appreciated  the 
special  quality  of  the  play  and  of  the  performance, 
saying  that  it  had  a  flavor  of  its  own:  "C'est  quel- 
que  chose  de  tres-particulier." 

At  Harrigan's  request  I  took  Coquelin  behind  the 
scenes  and  introduced  him,  discovering  to  my  sur- 
prise that  Harrigan  could  speak  French.  In  fact, 
his  understanding  of  the  foreign  tongue  was  more 
thoro  than  Lester  Wallack's,  if  I  may  judge  by  a 
slip  of  the  latter  in  a  talk  he  had  with  me  after  I 
had  published  an  article  on  the  Comedie-Frangaise 
in  which  there  were  portraits  of  the  two  Coquelins, 
labelled  respectively  "Coquelin  Aine"  and  "Coquelin 
Cadet."  Wallack  remarked  to  me  that  he  had 
been  talking  with  Boucicault  about  this  article,  add- 
ing that  "Dion  says  that  the  younger  Coquelin 
aine  is  the  better  actor."  The  blunder  in  French 
was  Wallack's  own,  even  if  the  blunder  in  criticism 
was  Boucicault's.  And  perhaps  this  is  as  good  a 
moment  as  any  that  I  am  likely  to  find  in  these 
pages,  to  set  down  another  blunder  of  another 
manager  who  was  hesitating  over  a  play  of  mine. 
"I  like  the  people  in  your  piece  and  the  talk  is  ex- 
cellent," he  said,  "but  I  don't  much  care  for  the 
plot.  Can't  you  use  those  characters  and  that  dia- 
log in  another  story  ?  " 


362  THESE   MANY   YEARS 


IV 

In  the  last  thirty  years  of  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury the  most  prominent  actor-manager  in  Great 
Britain  was  Henry  Irving;  and  in  my  successive 
visits  to  London  and  in  his  successive  visits  to  New 
York  I  was  enabled  to  see  him  repeatedly  in  all 
his  more  prominent  parts.  He  had  a  compelling 
personality  as  an  actor  and  nothing  that  he  did  was 
negligible.  He  had  \he  grand  style,  in  spite  of 
the  mannerisms  of  his  walk  and  of  his  utterance. 
He  used  his  taste,  his  skill,  his  inventiveness  as  a 
stage-manager  to  set  off  his  achievement  as  an  actor 
and  to  supplement  and  even  on  occasion  to  dis- 
guise his  histrionic  limitations. 

He  was  large-minded  and  liberal,  as  he  proved 
when  he  invited  Booth  to  join  him  at  the  Lyceum 
and  to  alternate  with  him  as  Othello  and  lago.  This 
was  truly  generous,  since  Irving  was  prosperous  at 
the  time,  and  Booth's  London  engagement  had  not 
been  successful.  It  was  perhaps  even  more  gener- 
ous than  Irving  himself  suspected,  because  Booth 
was  a  tragedian  who  could  rise  to  Othello,  altho  he 
was  perhaps  even  more  effective  in  the  character 
part  of  lago,  whereas  Irving  was  essentially  a  per- 
former of  character  parts  and  lacked  the  massive- 
ness  and  the  sweep  which  tragedy  demands. 

To  my  great  regret  I  did  not  arrive  in  London 
that  summer  until  after  the  twin  stars  had  ceased 
to  shine  simultaneously.  But  from  a  friend  in  the 
Lyceum  company  I  heard  how  Irving  had  deferred 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  363 

in  every  way  to  Booth,  only  to  discover  that  the 
American  was  only  too  glad  to  let  his  British  friend 
carry  all  the  burden  of  stage-management.  Irving 
himself  set  so  much  store  by  meticulous  exactness 
in  detail  that  he  was  perturbed  to  find  that  Booth 
felt  himself  to  be  wholly  independent  of  its  assistance. 
He  could  not  quite  understand  Booth's  attitude  in 
relying  entirely  upon  his  sheer  power  as  an  actor.  A 
keen  and  competent  critic  of  acting,  Gordon  Wigan, 
gave  me  an  unbiased  opinion  of  the  two  memorable 
performances,  declaring  that  nothing  could  be  more 
delightful  than  Booth  as  Othello  and  Irving  as  lago, 
whereas  the  next  evening  when  the  characters  were 
exchanged  the  result  was  most  unsatisfactory,  since 
Booth  as  lago  simply  extinguished  Irving  as  Othello, 
a  part  for  which  the  British  actor  had  not  the  physical 
qualifications. 

When  Irving  paid  his  first  visit  to  America  we 
made  him  a  Kinsman,  and  with  his  usual  liberality 
he  immediately  presented  to  every  other  Kinsman 
a  "bone"  for  the  Lyceum  in  London  —  an  engraved 
ivory  token  admitting  any  one  of  us  at  any  time  to 
his  theater.  At  one  Kinsmen  supper  in  April,  1884, 
I  had  the  good  luck  to  be  seated  between  Booth  and 
Irving;  it  was  grateful  to  observe  the  cordiality  of 
their  friendship,  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  they  were 
necessarily  professional  rivals.  When  they  fell  to 
discussing  the  great  actors  of  the  past,  I  sat  silent, 
listening  to  each  in  turn;  and  I  watched  to  see 
whether  either  of  them  had  really  read  up  the  his- 
tory of  his  own  art,  something  which  artists  rare- 
ly do,  contenting  themselves  with  the  practice  of 


364  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

it.  I  soon  saw  that  Booth's  filial  devotion  to  his 
father  had  led  him  to  learn  all  he  could  about  his 
father's  rivals,  especially  the  foremost  of  them  all, 
Edmund  Kean,  and  that  he  had  therefore  been  lured 
into  wider  reading  about  the  Kembles.  I  saw  also 
that  Irving  was  not  at  all  familiar  with  the  his- 
trionic history  of  his  own  country,  and  that  he 
neither  confessed  his  ignorance  nor  pretended  to 
knowledge  that  he  did  not  possess.  He  let  Booth 
talk,  and  from  time  to  time,  threw  in  an  anecdote 
that  had  come  to  him  by  oral  tradition.  I  recall 
this  as  a  remarkable  exhibition  of  perfect  poise  and 
self-control  in  self-defense.  And  what  I  noted  that 
evening  confirmed  in  my  mind  the  truth  of  the  cur- 
rent rumor  that  Irving  did  not  himself  compose  the 
addresses  and  the  articles  which  he  signed. 

Of  this  I  had  further  corroborative  evidence  later. 
At  different  times  Irving  lectured  at  Harvard  on 
'English  Actors'  and  at  Columbia  on  'Macbeth,'  and 
he  also  contributed  occasional  articles  on  the  art 
of  acting  and  on  Shakspere  to  the  magazines.  I  do 
not  doubt  that  the  opinions  herein  expressed,  the 
main  points,  were  Irving's  own;  but  the  looking  up 
of  quotations  and  the  ultimate  literary  expression 
he  confided  to  a  confidential  secretary,  following  the 
example  of  those  members  of  Parliament  and  of 
Congress  who  have  their  speeches  written  for  them. 
Irving's  confidential  secretary  was  a  man  named 
Louis  F.  Austin,  who  wrote  a  book  about  his  employer 
which  he  signed  with  a  pen-name,  "F.  Daly."  In 
London  only  a  few  months  after  our  Kinsmen  supper 
I  was  dining  with  a  friend,  who  showed  me  the 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  365 

title-page  of  one  of  living's  addresses  with  this 
legend  written  boldly  across  it:  "To  my  friend 

,  with  the  compliments  of  the  author,  Louis 

F.  Austin."  This  seemed  to  me  then,  as  it  seems  to 
me  now,  a  contemptible  example  of  treachery  to  a 
generous  master. 

If  Irving  had  ever  known  this  I  cannot  but  think 
that  it  would  have  pained  him,  altho  he  was  a  mag- 
nanimous man  and  altho  he  had  a  sense  of  humor 
sufficient  to  permit  his  enjoyment  of  a  joke  on  him- 
self. One  of  these  jokes  on  himself  I  heard  from  his 
close  friend  Walter  Pollock.  Irving  won  his  first 
success  as  Hamlet  while  the  Lyceum  was  still  under 
the  management  of  "Colonel"  Bateman;  for  sev- 
eral years  before  Bateman  took  the  theater  it  had 
been  devoted  to  comic  opera.  As  the  dramatic 
critic  of  the  Saturday  Review 9  Pollock  had  attended 
the  first  performance  of  'Hamlet,'  but  before  writ- 
ing his  article  he  went  again  later  in  the  week  and 
he  found  himself  by  the  side  of  a  lank  Dundreary- 
ish  man  who  became  increasingly  restless  as  the  first 
act  progressed.  When  the  curtain  fell,  he  seemed 
at  a  loss  what  to  do;  but  finally  he  turned  to  Pollock. 
"I  beg  your  pardon,"  he  began,  "but  do  you  know 
this  play?"  Pollock  admitted  his  familiarity  with 
the  piece.  "Very  well,  then,"  was  the  relieved  reply; 
"perhaps  you  can  tell  me  if  that  tall,  thin  young  man 
in  black  appears  again?"  Pollock  responded  that 
the  tall,  thin  young  man  in  black  was  the  chief  per- 
sonage in  the  play  and  would  therefore  appear  very 
frequently.  "Ah!"  said  his  neighbor,  disappointed 
in  the  burlesque  he  had  expected  to  find  at  that 


366  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

theater.  "  Ah  !  Then  in  that  case  I'm  off !"  And 
he  took  his  hat  and  departed.  And  Pollock  went 
back  to  Irving' s  dressing-room  and  told  him,  altho 
I  cannot  be  sure  that  the  actor's  laughter  was  either 
hearty  or  sincere. 


It  has  often  been  pointed  out  that  great  actors 
rarely  do  anything  for  the  drama  of  their  own 
language  in  their  own  time,  preferring  to  measure 
themselves  with  their  mighty  predecessors  in  the 
great  parts  of  the  great  plays  of  the  past.  It  was 
said  of  John  Kemble  that  he  thought  all  the  good 
parts  had  been  written.  Coquelin  is  the  most  ob- 
vious exception  to  this  general  rule,  for  he  created 
a  host  of  characters  in  plays  by  his  contemporaries 
even  if  he  won  his  major  reputation  by  his  perform- 
ance of  the  characters  Moliere  had  composed  for 
his  own  acting.  Neither  Booth  nor  Jefferson  was 
ever  on  the  lookout  for  new  plays;  and  altho  Irving 
brought  out  more  novelties  than  either  of  the  Ameri- 
cans, no  one  of  these  has  established  itself  in  the 
theater  now  that  it  is  no  longer  supported  by  his 
authority,  not  even  the  '  Becket '  of  Tennyson  or  the 
'Charles  I'  of  W.  G.  Wills.  It  has  even  been  sug- 
gested, and  with  not  a  little  show  of  reason,  that 
the  contemporary  drama  is  likely  to  languish  when 
the  stage  is  occupied  by  actors  of  commanding 
power  and  that  it  is  only  when  the  actor  cannot 
domineer  over  the  playwright  that  the  contemporary 
drama  has  its  chance  to  expand  and  to  reveal  the 
best  of  which  it  is  capable. 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  367 

But  if  Edwin  Booth  did  nothing  for  the  drama  of 
his  language,  he  did  a  great  deal  for  his  profession. 
He  founded  The  Players,  a  club  intended  primarily 
for  the  actor,  the  dramatist,  and  the  manager,  where 
they  might  mingle  at  ease  with  the  practitioners  of 
the  allied  arts  of  literature  and  music,  painting,  sculp- 
ture, and  architecture.  Booth  had  long  been  con- 
sidering a  gift  for  the  benefit  of  his  calling.  Edwin 
Forrest  had  left  his  house  and  his  fortune  to  shelter 
superannuated  members  of  the  profession;  but 
Booth  preferred  to  make  provision  for  the  actors 
while  they  were  still  on  the  stage.  He  consulted 
his  friends,  Lawrence  Barrett,  E.  C.  Benedict,  and 
Thomas  Bailey  Aldrich.  It  was  on  Benedict's 
yacht  that  he  finally  decided  to  establish  a  club; 
it  was  Aldrich  who  suggested  its  name.  Booth 
communicated  his  intention  to  Daly  and  to  Palmer; 
and  early  in  1888  Daly  gave  a  luncheon  to  which  he 
invited  the  organizers  of  the  new  club  —  and  on 
the  back  of  my  bill-of-fare  I  find  the  autographs  of 
Lawrence  Barrett,  William  Bispham,  Edwin  Booth, 
S.  L.  Clemens,  Augustin  Daly,  Joseph  F.  Daly, 
John  Drew,  Harry  Edwards,  Laurence  Hutton, 
Joseph  Jefferson,  John  A.  Lane,  James  Lewis, 
Brander  Matthews,  Stephen  Henry  Olin,  A.  M. 
Palmer,  and  William  T.  Sherman. 

Thereupon  Booth  bought  16  Gramercy  Park; 
and  Stanford  White  altered  it  and  decorated  it  so 
skilfully  and  so  tastefully  that  it  looked  friendly 
and  homelike  on  the  night  of  its  opening  —  the  last 
night  of  1889,  when  the  donor  read  his  deed  of  gift 
and  The  Players  took  possession  of  their  future 


368  THESE   MANY   YEARS 

abode.  In  view  of  this  project  Booth  had  long 
been  gathering  portraits  of  actors,  and  he  had  pur- 
chased a  similar  collection  made  by  his  brother-in- 
law,  John  S.  Clarke.  The  histrionic  gallery  of  The 
Players  is  now  worthy  of  comparison  with  that  of 
the  Garrick  Club  in  London,  which  possesses  no 
finer  portrait  than  the  picture  of  Booth  himself, 
painted  by  John  S.  Sargent  and  presented  by  E.  C. 
Benedict.  Among  the  paintings  that  Booth  had 
acquired  was  a  portrait  of  Washington,  but  he 
hesitated  to  give  us  this  with  the  others  because 
it  seemed  out  of  place.  He  expressed  this  doubt 
to  Aldrich,  who  instantly  replied:  "I  see  no  objec- 
tion to  putting  Washington  by  the  side  of  the  actors. 
He  was  our  Leading  Man  !" 

As  a  member  of  the  committee  on  literature  and  art 
I  helped  to  arrange  the  books  given  to  us  by  Booth 
and  by  Barrett;  and  I  found  wall-space  in  the  hall 
for  a  long  sequence  of  engraved  portraits  of  the 
English  Kings  which  had  served  Booth  in  his  per- 
formances of  one  or  another  of  Shakspere's  histor- 
ical plays.  I  told  the  man  who  was  putting  up  the 
rails  to  accommodate  these  prints  to  arrange  them  in 
chronological  order;  and  when  I  saw  them  on  the 
walls  I  perceived  that  he  had  misinterpreted  this 
direction.  He  had  put  them  in  alphabetical  order, 
the  four  Georges  preceding  the  eight  Henrys,  with  the 
four  Williams  bringing  up  the  end  of  the  procession. 

From  the  very  beginning  the  new  club  justified 
the  hopes  of  its  founder.  In  it,  amid  congenial  as- 
sociations, he  spent  the  last  years  of  his  life.  In  it  at 
last  he  died,  in  the  room  which  is  kept  just  as  it  was 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  369 

when  he  was  seized  with  his  final  attack.  From  the 
very  beginning  The  Players  had  an  atmosphere  of 
its  own  which  has  endured  for  now  a  quarter  of  a 
century.  It  has  its  genial  traditions  and  it  has  ful- 
filled its  founder's  purpose.  Perhaps  some  part  of 
its  charm  may  be  due  to  the  gentle  influence  of 
Booth  himself,  surviving  year  after  year.  A  British 
actor  who  had  been  a  guest  of  The  Players  for  a 
month  once  put  this  into  words,  "I  don't  see  how 
it  is  here,"  he  said,  "but  you  seem  to  be  different. 
On  our  side  we  talk  about  Irving  or  Henry  Irving, 
but  here  you  generally  speak  of  the  man  who  gave 
you  this  club  as  Mr.  Booth."  I  had  not  before 
noted  that  this  was  our  practice  but  I  recognized  it 
immediately  as  an  instinctive  tribute  of  involuntary 
respect. 

VI 

It  is  sometimes  asserted  that  actors  are  a  curiously 
self-centered  race  of  beings,  often  unduly  conceited 
and  even  vainglorious.  William  Archer  has  sug- 
gested as  an  explanation  that  the  circumstances  of  his 
art  compel  the  comedian  and  the  tragedian  to  per- 
sistent thought  about  his  own  person,  since  he  has 
always  to  live  in  a  room  lined  with  mirrors.  What- 
ever justice  there  may  be  in  the  charge  against  cer- 
tain members  of  the  profession,  I  should  like  to  put 
on  record  here  my  firm  conviction  that  it  does  not 
lie  against  the  leaders  of  the  craft  whom  I  have 
had  the  privilege  of  knowing  intimately.  Booth 
and  Irving,  Jefferson  and  Coquelin  and  Barnay 


370  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

were  as  little  forthputting  or  self-valuing  or  intoler- 
ant as  any  men  I  have  ever  met.  I  do  not  mean 
to  suggest  that  they  were  not  severally  conscious 
of  their  respective  positions  at  the  head  of  their 
profession.  That  knowledge  they  could  not  fail 
to  possess.  But  they  were  none  of  them  grudgingly 
jealous,  as  Macready  disclosed  himself  to  be  in  his 
diary;  they  were  not  self-assertive,  being  preserved 
from  this  by  their  indisputable  eminence.  In  their 
several  ways  they  were  all  modest,  with  a  modesty 
not  frequently  found  among  artists  in  whatever  art. 
With  no  lack  of  the  self-confidence  necessary  to 
their  achievement  they  seemed  to  be  simple-minded 
and  without  pretense.  Perhaps  this  simple-minded- 
ness was  a  little  less  evident  in  Coquelin  and  in 
Irving  than  in  Booth  and  in  Jefferson.  Nothing 
could  be  more  modest  than  a  remark  Jefferson  once 
made  to  me  after  he  had  been  praising  his  half- 
brother,  Charles  Burke,  the  original  performer  of 
Rip  Van  Winkle:  "If  my  brother  Charley  had  only 
lived,  the  world  would  never  have  heard  of  me!" 
This  modesty  did  not  prevent  Jefferson  from  having 
the  courage  of  his  convictions.  He  knew  what  he 
liked  and  he  knew  why  he  liked  it.  I  heard  him 
say  that  the  performance  of  Weber  and  Fields  and 
Sam  Bernard  in  the  famous  "skindicate"  scene  in 
one  of  their  conglomerates  of  music  and  fun,  was 
the  finest  piece  of  comic  acting  he  had  seen  in  New 
York  that  winter.  On  the  other  hand,  he  did  not 
relish  the  ultra- veracity  of  'Cavalleria  Rusticana' 
as  this  was  revealed  by  Duse  and  her  excellent 
company  on  her  first  visit  to  America.  He  deplored 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  371 

the  lack  of  a  more  poetic  atmosphere  for  the  tragic 
story.  "It's  altogether  too  realistic,"  he  declared. 
"Why,  you  could  count  the  fleas  in  that  Italian  vil- 
lage!" I  ventured  to  suggest  that  if  it  had  been 
a  real  Italian  village,  he  could  not  have  counted  the 
fleas.  "What  I  mean  is  that  there  was  no  romance 
about  it,"  he  continued;  "that  girl  wasn't  seduced 
in  the  moonlight.  She  went  into  the  barn." 

I  regret  now  that  I  could  not  have  capped  this 
with  the  witty  remark  of  another  friend  to  the  effect 
that  "Duse  overacted  her  under-acting."  The  quip 
had  not  then  been  uttered;  but  I  have  no  doubt 
that  Jefferson  would  have  adopted  it,  if  he  could  have 
heard  it. 

During  one  of  Coquelin's  engagements  in  New 
York  a  supper  was  given  to  him  in  the  private  din- 
ing-room of  The  Players;  and  I  chanced  to  sit  side 
by  side  of  the  leading  man  of  the  French  company. 
The  next  time  I  saw  Coquelin,  he  asked  my  opinion 
of  the  performer.  "Well,"  I  responded,  "he  is  a 
good  enough  actor,  but  I  did  not  find  him  very  in- 
telligent." And  Coquelin  instantly  returned:  "But 
he  has  the  intelligence  of  his  profession.  That  is 
all  any  artist  really  needs  in  his  calling,  whether 
he  is  actor  or  musician  or  painter.  Take  Meissonier, 
for  example,  our  greatest  painter.  Well,  he  is  an 
old  chump  !  —  c'est  un  vieil  ganache."  This  explains 
our  frequent  disappointment  when  we  meet  a  prac- 
titioner of  any  one  of  the  arts,  whose  work  we  have 
admired  and  who  strikes  us  in  conversation  with 
him  as  less  richly  endowed  than  we  had  expected. 
We  had  looked  for  general  intelligence,  whereas 


372  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

all  the  artist  had  was  the  specific  intelligence  of  his 
profession,  the  native  gift  for  his  own  art.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  chiefs  in  any  calling  are  likely  also 
to  possess  a  full  share  of  general  intelligence. 
Coquelin  himself  abounded  in  it,  and  so  did  Jeffer- 
son, as  I  had  the  privilege  once  of  observing  on  a 
particular  occasion. 

When  Booth  died  we  elected  Jefferson  as  the 
president  of  The  Players.  I  was  then  a  member  of 
the  Board  of  Directors,  and  we  soon  observed  that 
our  new  presiding  officer  was  wholly  inexperienced 
in  parliamentary  procedure.  We  had  to  remind 
him  to  put  the  question  and  to  declare  the  result 
of  our  votes.  Unpractised  as  he  was,  his  native 
shrewdness  stood  him  in  stead  of  experience.  At 
one  of  our  meetings  we  had  to  face  a  very  awkward 
situation,  complicated  by  the  personal  relation  of 
two  members  of  the  Board  with  an  absent  member 
whose  wilful  negligence  of  duty  called  for  discipline. 
The  matter  was  brought  before  Jefferson,  who  knew 
nothing  at  all  about  the  facts;  and  it  was  a  delight 
to  see  the  clearness  and  the  certainty  with  which 
his  mind  worked  as  he  slowly  possessed  himself  of 
all  the  details.  When  we  adjourned  after  our  hour 
of  painful  tension,  one  of  my  associates  as  a  director, 
who  was  one  of  the  younger  leaders  of  the  bar,  said 
to  me  on  the  stairs:  "Did  you  see  what  the  old  man 
did?  He  deduced  the  governing  principle  and 
applied  it  unerringly  to  a  set  of  facts  wholly  novel 
to  him.  That  is  the  faculty  we  need  in  the  members 
of  the  Supreme  Court  —  and  don't  always  get !" 

Besides  this  keen  intelligence,  Jefferson  also  had 


AMONG  THE  PLAYERS  373 

a  quick  wit.  In  the  last  years  of  his  life  we  gave  him 
a  reception  at  the  Authors  Club,  at  which  he  made 
a  felicitous  address  partly  about  the  art  of  acting 
and  partly  about  himself,  ending,  as  was  his  wont, 
by  expressing  his  readiness  to  answer  any  questions 
that  might  be  put  to  him.  In  the  hope  of  heading 
off  futile  queries  about  the  Baconian  hypothesis, 
I  rose  and  asked  him  what  had  been  his  most  un- 
fortunate experience  on  the  stage.  He  told  us  that 
he  had  had  more  than  one  that  he  did  not  like  to 
remember,  but  that  perhaps  the  saddest  was  when  he 
was  put  forward  at  the  early  age  of  five  to  sing  the 
'Star-Spangled  Banner'  and  when  the  words  of  the 
second  stanza  escaped  from  his  memory.  When 
he  had  made  an  end  of  his  amusing  story,  another 
member  of  the  Authors  inquired  what  had  been  the 
pleasantest  experience  of  the  actor's  life,  where- 
upon Jefferson  smiled  that  winning  smile  of  his  and 
at  once  replied:  "Why,  this  reception  this  evening, 
of  course!" 


CHAPTER  XVI 
ADVENTURES  IN  STORY-TELLING 


DURING  these  years  of  occasional  play-writing 
and  of  continuous  playgoing  I  was  ply- 
ing my  trade  as  a  man  of  letters,  laboring 
in  a  variety  of  fields.  I  did  not  cease  writing  book- 
reviews  for  the  Saturday  Review  until  1894  and  for 
the  Nation  until  1895;  and  I  continued  to  contrib- 
ute irregularly  to  the  Critic.  Papers  of  mine  on 
divers  topics  appeared  in  different  magazines.  For 
a  series  in  the  Forum,  for  example,  I  prepared  an 
article  on  'Books  that  have  helped  me.'  Probably 
I  took  the  theater  as  a  topic  more  than  any  other; 
and  in  1894  I  gathered  into  a  little  book  half-a-score 
of  my  'Studies  of  the  Stage.'  This  tiny  tome  was 
uniform  with  a  volume  issued  a  year  or  two  earlier, 
called  'Americanisms  and  Briticisms  with  Other 
Essays  on  Other  Isms,',  in  which  I  had  collected  my 
earliest  inquiries  into  the  verbal  niceties  of  our 
language,  as  it  is  spoken  and  written  in  the  United 
States  and  in  Great  Britain. 

In  1895  I  sent  forth  a  volume  entitled  'Book- 
bindings Old  and  New:  Notes  of  a  Book-lover,' 
wherein  I  sheltered  essays  on  different  aspects  of 
the  bibliopegic  art  as  I  had  studied  it  in  the  libraries 
of  London  and  Paris  and  at  the  successive  inter  - 

374 


ADVENTURES  IN  STORY-TELLING     375 

national  exhibitions  on  one  side  or  the  other  of  the 
Atlantic.  I  fear  that  the  bibliophiles  of  the  strictest 
sect  would  deny  my  right  of  admission  to  their 
ancient  brotherhood,  because  I  have  always  been 
more  interested  in  the  insides  of  books  than  in  the 
out  sides.  Yet  even  if  I  am  excluded  from  the  fra- 
ternity I  have  found  profit  in  my  diligent  inquiry 
into  the  practices  of  the  leading  masters  of  the 
bookbinder's  craft,  living  and  dead;  and  this  in- 
vestigation proved  to  be  more  fertile  than  I  had 
expected  when  I  drifted  into  it,  because  it  made 
plain  to  me,  as  nothing  had  done  previously,  the 
irrefragable  interdependence  of  the  decorative  arts, 
any  one  of  which  is  likely  at  any  moment  to  influence 
the  development  of  any  other.  It  instructed  me  as 
much  as  it  amused  me  to  trace  the  appropriation  of 
patterns  from  oriental  tiles  for  the  book-covers  of 
the  Italian  Renascence  and  to  observe  the  borrow- 
ing by  the  French  binders  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury of  motives  originally  devised  by  the  contem- 
porary craftsmen  in  wrought-iron. 

In  this  same  year,  1895,  I  was  lucky  enough  to 
be  awarded  the  second  prize  in  a  contest  for  a  de- 
tective-story. The  first  prize  was  taken  by  Miss 
Mary  E.  Wilkins,  who  founded  her  tale,  the  'Long 
Arm,'  on  the  unsolved  mystery  of  the  notorious 
Borden  murder.  My  own  effort  was  less  sanguinary, 
as  it  dealt  only  with  the  exposure  of  the  purloiner 
of  an  intangible  object.  In  other  words,  the  thing 
stolen  was  a  business  secret;  and  I  so  arranged  the 
incidents  of  my  narrative  that  the  thief  should  be 
identified  by  a  camera  concealed  in  a  clock  and 


376  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

taking  every  ten  minutes  a  photograph  of  the  safe 
in  which  the  private  papers  were  sheltered.  I 
called  my  short-story  the  'Twinkling  of  an  Eye'; 
and  plumed  myself  not  a  little  on  the  novelty  of 
my  device.  But  my  pride  had  a  fall,  shortly  after 
my  narrative  had  appeared  in  a  heterogeny  of 
Sunday  papers,  when  I  received  a  letter  from  a 
midwestern  correspondent  informing  me  that  he 
had  made  use  of  precisely  the  same  expedient  to 
catch  the  unknown  robber  of  his  cash-drawer.  I 
accepted  this  as  added  evidence  that  fact  is  likely 
always  to  keep  ahead  of  fiction  and  that  the  inge- 
nuity of  a  story-teller  is  certain  to  come  off  second 
best  in  any  competition  with  the  infinite  resource  of 
the  practical  world.  In  the  case  of  the  'Twinkling 
of  an  Eye'  I  had  at  least  the  satisfaction  of  ascer- 
taining that  I  had  invented  my  fiction,  even  if  it  had 
not  appeared  in  print  before  it  came  into  existence 
as  an  actual  fact. 

Perhaps  I  may  permit  myself  here  to  mention 
another  invention  of  mine,  more  strictly  within  my 
own  field  as  a  man  of  letters.  It  was,  I  think  in 
this  same  year,  1895,  or  in  the  year  after,  that  I 
received  a  visit  from  a  book-canvasser  who  be- 
lieved that  there  was  money  in  a  series  of  volumes 
containing  extracts  from  the  great  writers  of  all 
languages  and  all  countries.  In  going  from  house 
to  house  selling  subscription-books  he  had  come 
to  the  conclusion  that  a  comprehensive  anthology 
of  prose  and  verse  in  twenty  or  thirty  substantial 
volumes  would  be  purchased  by  a  very  large  number 
of  fairly  well-to-do  Americans  who  would  accept 


ADVENTURES  IN  STORY-TELLING     377 

this  series  more  or  less  as  a  substitute  for  a  bookcase 
filled  with  miscellaneous  volumes.  It  was  to  pro- 
vide good  reading  in  all  departments  of  literature 
and  it  ought  also  to  be  available  constantly  as  a 
work  of  reference. 

My  visitor  told  me  that  he  had  submitted  his 
project  to  a  publishing  house,  which  had  taken  it  up 
eagerly;  and  he  was  now  in  search  of  an  editor.  He 
had  approached  Charles  Dudley  Warner,  whose 
hesitation  he  hoped  to  be  able  to  overcome.  As 
the  scheme  was  set  before  me  it  was  rather  shadowy; 
and  neither  its  originator  nor  its  future  publishers 
knew  exactly  what  they  wanted,  altho  they  had 
already  employed  compilers  to  select  appropriate 
extracts.  I  told  the  canvasser  that  he  needed  a 
clear  plan  for  the  whole  undertaking  and  any  money 
would  be  wasted  which  was  spent  before  a  definite 
prospectus  had  been  drawn  up.  To  this  he  answered 
that  he  had  come  to  me  in  the  hope  that  I  would 
prepare  an  outline  on  which  they  could  get  to  work 
at  once.  He  explained  he  knew  how  to  sell  books, 
but  he  did  not  know  what  to  put  in  the  books  he 
was  going  to  sell;  he  complimented  me  by  calling 
me  an  expert  in  literature  and  as  such  I  was  invited 
to  give  my  professional  advice.  The  project  seemed 
to  me  promising  and  I  informed  him  that  I  was  quite 
willing  to  draw  up  a  proper  plan  if  I  could  be  as- 
sured of  a  proper  fee  for  my  services,  such  as  a 
lawyer  would  charge  for  his  opinion  or  a  physician 
for  a  momentous  consultation.  I  named  a  modest 
figure,  which  was  accepted  without  protest;  and  the 
next  week  I  met  the  canvasser,  the  publishers,  —  and 


378  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

also  Warner,  who  had  decided  to  accept  the  editor- 
ship if  he  could  find  out  exactly  what  he  was  expected 
to  edit.  It  was  at  this  conference  that  we  came  to 
a  clear  understanding  as  to  the  content,  the  scale, 
and  the  appropriate  contributors  to  the  bulky  series 
of  tomes  which  constituted  Warner's  'Library  of 
the  World's  Best  Literature.'  The  plan  accepted 
that  afternoon  was  amplified  as  the  work  progressed, 
but  it  was  not  modified,  that  is  to  say,  it  was  never 
materially  departed  from;  in  fact,  it  has  since  served 
as  the  model  for  half-a-dozen  similar  ventures. 
Warner  invited  me  to  be  one  of  the  advisory  board; 
and  at  his  request  I  prepared  the  introductory 
biographical  criticisms  of  Moliere,  Beaumarchais, 
and  Sheridan. 

n 

I  have  grouped  together  in  the  foregoing  para- 
graphs several  varied  literary  activities,  so  that  I 
might  deal  consecutively  with  my  contemporary 
writing  of  fiction.  I  have  already  spoken  of  my 
earlier  short-stories  and  of  the  'Last  Meeting,' 
which  was  a  rather  brief  novel  when  it  ought  to  have 
been  a  rather  long  short-story.  The  'Last  Meeting' 
had  been  published  in  1885;  and  for  the  next  half- 
dozen  years  I  confined  myself  to  short-stories,  still 
composed  more  or  less  under  the  influence  of  the 
clever  and  artificial  tales  of  the  author  of  'Marjory 
Daw.'  Then  quite  unexpectedly,  since  I  had  only 
very  infrequently  contributed  to  their  magazine, 
the  editors  of  St.  Nicholas  suggested  my  writing 
a  juvenile  serial.  I  appreciated  the  compliment  of 


ADVENTURES  IN  STORY-TELLING     379 

this  proposal  and  I  accepted  it  with  the  proviso  that 
I  was  to  be  released  if  I  could  not  hit  on  a  theme  for 
a  tale  likely  to  hold  the  attention  of  healthy  young 
Americans. 

I  examined  my  episodic  recollections  of  my  own 
school-days  in  the  vain  hope  that  I  might  be  able 
to  reveal  myself  as  the  author  of  an  American  'Tom 
Brown  at  Rugby. '  I  soon  saw  that  I  could  replevin 
nothing  of  value  from  my  years  at  Anthon's  or 
Churchill's  or  Charlier's,  altho  I  did  recapture  cer- 
tain boyish  traits  floating  in  my  memory  of  that 
remote  past  which  most  unimaginative  men  leave 
behind  them  once  for  all  when  they  have  come  to 
man's  estate.  Of  course,  I  reread  'Tom  Brown' 
itself;  and  I  was  disappointed  to  perceive  its  crudity 
of  construction,  its  amateurishness  of  method,  altho 
the  salient  episodes,  like  the  fight  with  Slogger 
Williams,  were  still  instinct  with  vitality.  I  am 
inclined  to  believe  now  that  the  immediate  popu- 
larity of  that  classic  of  British  boyhood  may  have 
been  due  mainly  ,to  this  heroic  combat.  He  was  a 
true  boy  who,  when  his  mother  proposed  to  read  to 
him  out  of  the  Bible,  asked  her  to  pick  out  "the 
fightingest  parts." 

I  reread  also  Aldrich's  'Story  of  a  Bad  Boy,'  the 
truly  autobiographic  Tom  Bailey,  and  the  'Adven- 
tures of  Tom  Sawyer.'  These  are  books  that  no 
boy's  library  should  be  without,  and  I  resolved  that 
whenever  I  might  write  my  juvenile  serial  story, 
it  should  have  a  good  fight  in  it,  and  its  young  hero 
should  be  called  Tom,  to  mate  with  Tom  Brown, 
Tom  Bailey  and  Tom  Sawyer.  And  quite  by  acci- 


380  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

dent  one  day  there  came  to  me  the  germ  of  a  plot, 
the  long  hunt  of  a  New  York  lad  for  a  sum  of  money 
stolen  from  his  great-great-grandfather  in  the  Rev- 
olutionary War.  With  this  as  the  center  of  my 
story  I  was  soon  able  to  devise  a  succession  of  epi- 
sodes and  to  people  my  plot  with  a  group  of  con- 
trasted juvenile  characters,  several  of  them  being 
suggested  to  me  more  or  less  directly  by  young 
people  and  by  grown-ups  of  my  acquaintance. 

As  the  incident  of  the  Revolutionary  War  which 
was  at  the  core  of  my  story  had  to  be  the  battle  of 
Harlem  Heights,  I  was  forced  to  lay  the  scene  of  my 
tale  in  and  around  Riverside  Drive,  which  had  then 
just  begun  to  be  built  up.  I  opened  my  narrative 
with  a  description  of  this  region  then  in  course  of 
transition  from  a  semi-rural  neighborhood  to  a 
completely  urfean  community;  and  I  immediately 
introduced  my  group  of  boys  gathered  about  a  bon- 
fire on  Election  night  in  a  canon  formed  by  a  street 
which  had  been  cut  down  to  the  grade  of  the  River- 
side Drive,  leaving  cliffs  of  rock  towering  on  both 
sides.  Less  than  half-a-dozen  years  after  I  had  vis- 
ited this  territory  for  the  first  time  to  study  the 
scenery  of  my  story,  Columbia  College  moved  from 
Forty-ninth  Street  to  Morningside  Heights,  a  re- 
moval which  led  us  to  sell  our  house  in  Eighteenth 
Street  and  to  buy  another  on  the  corner  of  West 
End  Avenue  and  Ninety -third  Street.  And  to  my 
great  surprise,  when  I  came  to  reconnoiter  my  new 
surroundings,  I  found  that  I  was  then  a  resident  of 
the  very  street  ending  in  a  canon  in  which  my 
youthful  band  had  made  its  first  appearance. 


ADVENTURES  IN  STORY-TELLING     381 

'Tom  Paulding,  a  Tale  of  Treasure-trove  in  the 
Streets  of  New  York,'  was  published  as  a  book  in 
the  fall  of  1892,  after  having  done  its  duty  first 
in  twelve  numbers  of  St.  Nicholas.  While  it  was 
in  the  course  of  serial  publication,  and  when  only 
five  or  six  parts  had  been  printed,  Thomas  Went- 
worth  Higginson  wrote  me  that  his  little  daughter 
was  following  the  fortunes  of  my  hero,  as  these 
were  disclosed  month  by  month.  He  informed  me 
further  that  when  she  had  finished  the  current  in- 
stalment she  laid  down  the  magazine  in  disgust 
with  the  remark  that  she  "did  not  think  Mr.  Brander 
Matthews  a  very  good  story-teller."  Her  father 
requested  her  reason  for  this  severe  criticism. 
"Why,"  she  answered,  "don't  you  see?  He  always 
stops  the  story  at  the  most  interesting  place." 

Ill 

It  was  possibly  because  I  had  frequently  crossed 
the  Atlantic  in  my  boyhood  for  prolonged  visits, 
and  had  thus  become  familiar  with  many  of  the  capi- 
tals of  Europe,  that  I  came  early  to  an  appreciation 
of  the  individuality,  the  picturesqueness,  and  the 
charm  of  New  York.  I  found  that  Bunner  shared 
this  feeling  with  me;  and  we  used  to  wonder  how  it 
was  that  so  few  novels  had  then  been  written  with 
this  city  as  their  background.  When  we  first  dis- 
cussed the  topic,  in  1879  or  in  1880,  we  could  count 
on  the  fingers  of  one  hand  the  works  of  fiction  which 
had  their  scene  laid  in  the  Empire  City.  There 
was  the  'Potiphar  Papers'  of  Curtis,  if  that  could 


382  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

fairly  be  termed  a  novel,  which  may  be  doubted; 
and  there  was  the  'Cecil  Dreeme'  of  Theodore 
Winthrop,  to  be  considered  rather  as  a  romance. 

In  fact,  the  novel  of  Boston  was  then  more  abun- 
dant than  the  novel  of  New  York;  and  Howells 
was  then  describing  the  manners  and  customs  of 
Bostonians,  preparatory  to  his  removal  to  New 
York,  where  he  was  to  lay  the  scene  of  his  'Hazard 
of  New  Fortunes'  (which  did  not  appear  until  1889). 
Before  the  publication  of  Howells's  significant  inter- 
pretation of  the  life  of  the  largest  city  in  America, 
we  had  only  Henry  James's  'Washington  Square' 
and  W.  H.  Bishop's  'House  of  a  Merchant  Prince.' 
When  this  last  book  came  out  there  was  a  courte- 
ous debate  between  Bishop  and  Bunner  on  the  possi- 
bilities of  New  York  as  a  field  for  fiction.  Bunner 
soon  turned  from  criticism  to  creation,  and  in  the 
*  Midge, '  in  which  he  gave  a  sympathetic  study  of  the 
French  quarter  near  Washington  Square,  and  in  his 
more  ambitious  'Story  of  a  New  York  House,'  he 
proved  by  example  that  the  possibilities  of  the  field 
were  more  tempting  than  his  adversary  in  the  dis- 
cussion had  been  willing  to  admit.  I  must  not 
neglect  to  mention  the  succession  of  painful  examina- 
tions of  different  aspects  of  New  York  undertaken  by 
Edgar  Fawcett  in  a  series  of  stories,  wherein  the 
aspiration  of  the  author  was  more  evident  than  his 
inspiration. 

The  field  was  here,  and  it  was  fertile,  and  further- 
more, it  had  not  been  pre-empted.  Yet  there  were 
very  few  of  us  who  then  recognized  the  richness 
of  the  soil  or  who  had  confidence  in  the  crop  that 


ADVENTURES  IN  STORY-TELLING     383 

could  be  raised.  London  had  been  painted  on 
the  broad  canvases  of  a  host  of  robust  novelists, 
even  if  the  minor  aspects  of  her  life  had  not  tempted 
the  more  delicate  miniaturists  of  the  short-story; 
but  New  York  had  not  yet  attracted  either  the 
novelists  or  the  tellers  of  brief  tales.  Her  streets 
were  paved  with  gold  as  opulently  in  those  days  as 
they  are  now;  but  the  men  of  letters  who  strayed 
here  and  there  in  her  thorofares  had  not  the  vision 
to  perceive  that  they  were  living  in  a  Golconda  of 
opportunity.  Paris  had  been  glorified  by  an  im- 
mortal succession  of  men  of  genius  and  of  men  of 
talent,  from  Victor  Hugo  and  Balzac  to  Daudet  and 
Zola.  The  panorama  of  Parisian  society  had  been 
boldly  brushed  in  by  generation  after  generation  of 
keen-eyed  and  skilful  interpreters  of  its  myriad 
manifestations.  Even  if  we  in  America  were  not 
yet  ripe  for  a  great  novelist  to  celebrate  our  city  by 
the  sea,  I  failed  to  understand  how  it  was  that  we 
had  not  developed  short-story  writers  akin  to  Halevy 
and  Coppee  and  Maupassant,  writers  inspired  by  a 
like  ambition  even  if  they  could  not  attain  to  a  like 
art. 

I  need  not  say  here  that  it  was  not  with  any  inten- 
tion of  measuring  myself  with  these  masters  of  fic- 
tion, major  and  minor,  that  I  began  to  write  short- 
stories  saturated  with  local  color.  My  motive  was 
at  once  more  modest  and  far  simpler.  I  attempted 
to  catch  certain  aspects  and  attributes  of  New  York 
merely  because  I  found  keen  enjoyment  in  making 
these  snap-shots  of  the  metropolis,  and  because  I 
kept  on  observing  conditions  and  situations  which 


384  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

seemed  to  me  to  be  essentially  characteristic  of  the 
city  I  loved.  There  were  few  in  those  days  of  the 
late  seventies  and  early  eighties  of  the  last  century 
daring  enough  to  admit  any  affection  for  New  York; 
and  there  were  almost  none  ready  to  vaunt  it.  The 
inhabitants  of  New  York  were  at  that  time  perhaps 
a  little  too  close  to  the  draft-riots,  to  the  Tweed 
ring,  to  the  Black  Friday  of  Jim  Fisk  and  Jay  Gould, 
to  have  any  civic  pride;  and  they  were  almost 
equally  devoid  of  civic  consciousness.  I  rejoiced 
that  I  was  a  citizen  of  no  mean  city,  and  so  did 
Bunner,  who  had  already  rimed  some  of  his  lilting 
'Ballades  of  the  Town.'  We  saw  no  just  cause  for 
the  constant  disparagement  of  New  York  or  for  the 
deprecatory  tone  of  its  sparse  defenders.  New  York 
was  what  it  was;  and  we  loved  it  for  what  it  was, 
even  if  we  hoped  that  it  would  be  more  lovable  as 
the  years  rolled  on. 

One  of  the  characteristic  customs  of  New  York, 
the  Election-night  bonfire  —  a  custom  carried  over 
to  America  from  the  mother  country  in  the  old  co- 
lonial days,  when  it  celebrated  the  discomfiture  of 
Guy  Fawkes  —  I  had  introduced  into  'Tom  Paul- 
ding.'  But  there  were  many  others  crying  aloud,  so 
it  seemed  to  me,  to  be  commemorated  however  in- 
adequately. There  was  the  extraordinary  spectacle 
presented  by  Fifth  Avenue  on  the  afternoon  of 
Thanksgiving  Day  when  the  horns  of  many  coaches 
proclaimed  that  the  intercollegiate  football  game  had 
been  won  and  lost  —  a  spectacle  which  was  soon  to 
cease  to  be  visible,  so  rapidly  do  customs  come  and 
go  in  this  swift  life  of  ours.  There  was  the  Me- 


ADVENTURES  IN  STORY-TELLING     385 

morial  Day  parade;  there  was  the  private  view  of 
the  National  Academy  of  Design;  there  was  the  out- 
pouring of  families  into  lower  Central  Park  on  a 
Sunday  afternoon  in  early  spring;  there  was  the 
annual  Horse  Show  in  Madison  Square  Garden  in 
the  late  fall;  and  there  was  the  roof -garden  show  on 
the  top  of  some  building  in  the  middle  of  the  sum- 
mer. There  was  Mulberry  Bend  in  the  swelter  of  a 
hot  wave;  and  there  was  Wall  Street  blankly  un- 
inhabited on  a  holiday.  There  were  the  bobtailed 
cars,  and  the  shrieking  trains  of  the  elevated  rail- 
road with  clouds  of  steam  foaming  down  to  become 
iridescent  as  the  rays  of  the  setting  sun  shot  thru 
them.  There  was  color  everywhere,  unending  move- 
ment, incessant  vitality. 

In  the  years  that  followed  the  publication  of 
'Tom  Paulding'  I  put  forth  a  series  of  thumb-nail 
sketches  of  one  or  another  of  these  significant  mani- 
festations of  New  York.  Perhaps  my  little  etch- 
ings, never  deeply  bitten  into  the  plate,  were  far 
more  insignificant  than  I  liked  to  think  them;  yet 
they  had  the  merit  of  sincerity  and  of  directness. 
They  had  furthermore  the  merit  of  knowledge,  for 
I  never  went  out  of  my  depth,  avoiding  those  many 
aspects  of  metropolitan  existence  that  I  could  not 
adequately  interpret  because  they  were  beyond  my 
ken.  Sometimes  I  was  able  to  utilize  a  real  happen- 
ing, brought  to  me  by  word  of  mouth  and  there- 
fore more  malleable  than  if  it  had  been  snatched  from 
the  newspaper;  and  sometimes  the  germ  of  my  story 
had  to  evolve  by  spontaneous  generation  in  my 
own  head,  conjuring  up  the  ghost  of  a  plot  to  per- 


386  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

mit  me  to  reproduce  the  atmosphere  of  the  special 
spot  and  the  special  moment  I  had  chosen. 

When  I  had  written  a  dozen  of  these  urban  im- 
pressions, scarcely  solid  enough  in  texture  to  be 
termed  short-stories,  I  gathered  them  into  a  volume 
called  "Vignettes  of  Manhattan,'  and  published  in 
1894.  I  dedicated  it  to  Theodore  Roosevelt,  whom  I 
had  not  long  before  persuaded  to  write  a  book  about 
his  native  city  for  the  series  of  *  Historic  Towns,' 
edited  by  E.  A.  Freeman.  Three  years  later  I  was 
ready  with  a  second  dozen,  again  one  for  every 
month  in  the  year;  and  this  volume  was  entitled 
*  Outlines  in  Local  Color.'  But  it  was  not  until 
eighteen  years  after  'Vignettes  of  Manhattan/  long 
after  I  had  finally  renounced  the  writing  of  fiction, 
that  I  found  another  dozen  of  these  sketches  had 
been  accumulating  and  so  it  was  that  I  was  able  to 
send  forth  in  1912  a  final  volume  of  'Vistas  of  New 
York.'  Whatever  may  be  the  literary  worth  of  this 
triptych  of  the  Empire  City,  I  cannot  but  hope 
that  these  pen-and-ink  sketches  of  mine  may  per- 
haps be  useful  to  a  social  historian  in  the  twenty- 
first  century  when  he  is  at  a  loss  for  the  lighter 
literature  which  may  help  him  to  understand  and  to 
interpret  the  serried  facts  he  will  have  disinterred 
from  hundreds  of  less  vivacious  documents. 


IV 

In  the  same  years  in  which  I  was  making  these 
three  dozen  remarques,  if  I  may  so  call  them,  my 
ambition  to  chronicle  the  movement  of  the  mighty 


ADVENTURES  IN  STORY-TELLING     387 

city  led  me  to  attempt  three  larger  pictures  of  life 
in  Manhattan.  The  first  of  these  novels  of  New 
York  was  'His  Father's  Son,'  which  was  issued  in 
1895,  and  in  which  I  utilized  my  experiences  in  Wall 
Street  a  score  years  earlier.  Altho  I  had  never  been 
allured  by  the  hope  that  I  could  guess  at  the  vagaries 
of  the  market,  I  had  spent  my  days  in  the  midst  of 
those  who  had  deluded  themselves  into  the  belief 
that  they  could  win  against  the  odds,  almost  as 
mathematically  certain  as  those  of  the  gaming- 
table; and  from  the  windows  of  my  father's  office 
in  Broad  Street  almost  next  door  to  the  Stock  Ex- 
change I  had  looked  down  on  the  speculators  for  a 
quick  turn  as  dispassionately  and  as  seriously  as  I 
had  gazed  at  the  gamblers  who  sat  intent  about 
the  roulette-wheel  and  the  trente-et-quarante  tables 
at  Homburg  and  Baden-Baden  when  I  was  a  boy. 
I  utilized  in  my  plot  several  actual  happenings  that 
had  come  to  my  knowledge,  striving  to  be  as  ac- 
curate as  possible  in  my  presentation  of  the  tur- 
moil of  the  street,  with  its  intrigues  and  its  be- 
trayals. 

When  my  story  was  complete  Bunner  read  it  in 
manuscript  and  I  made  plain  any  point  which  was 
not  perfectly  clear  to  him  in  his  ignorance  of  the 
manners  and  customs  of  Wall  Street.  Another 
kind  friend,  more  familiar  with  the  intricacies  of 
speculation,  also  lent  me  his  aid,  and  I  made  straight 
the  occasional  slips  which  he  had  detected  in  my 
account  of  the  procedure  of  the  slaves  of  the  ticker. 
The  tone  of  my  tale  was  quiet  and  its  manner  was 
as  unsensational  as  may  be;  yet  I  believed  then, 


388  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

and  indeed  I  believe  now,  that  the  picture  I  painted 
was  true  to  life. 

My  second  novel  of  New  York  w^as  called  '  A  Con- 
fident To-morrow'  and  it  appeared  in  1899.  It  had 
for  its  hero  a  young  man  from  the  country  coming 
up  to  the  conquest  of  the  city;  he  was  a  newspaper 
man  and  the  action  took  place  wholly  in  literary 
circles  among  the  men  of  letters  and  the  editors 
and  the  illustrators  whom  I  had  come  to  know  in  the 
intimacy  of  daily  association.  Here  again  I  was 
able  to  utilize  things  seen  by  me  and  persons  known 
by  me;  and  here  again  the  action  was  simple  and 
straightforward,  with  the  emphasis  rather  on  what 
the  characters  were  than  on  what  they  did.  'A 
Confident  To-morrow'  was  my  effort  to  translate 
into  fiction  the  men  of  my  own  calling;  it  was  my 
remote  imitation  of  'Pendennis,'  a  novel  that  al- 
most every  novelist  is  moved  to  imitate  sooner  or 
later  in  the  practice  of  his  art.  Its  characters  were 
less  boldly  drawn  than  those  I  had  set  in  motion 
in  'His  Father's  Son,'  and  its  action  was  less  signifi- 
cant, yet  it  had  been  constructed  with  the  same 
care  and  with  the  same  punctilious  conscientiousness 
in  its  accessories. 

The  third  and  last  of  my  novels  of  New  York  was 
the  '  Action  and  the  Word,'  which  appeared  in  the 
spring  of  1900  and  in  which  I  essayed  a  picture  of 
fashionable  life,  with  its  frivolities  and  its  artificiali- 
ties. In  'His  Father's  Son'  the  interest  lay  in  the 
relation  of  parent  and  child;  in  'A  Confident  To- 
morrow' it  revolved  around  the  ardent  young  fel- 
low who  had  come  to  town  to  push  his  fortunes; 


ADVENTURES  IN  STORY-TELLING     389 

and  in  the  'Action  and  the  Word'  these  heroes,  old 
and  young,  yielded  the  stage  to  a  heroine,  whom  I 
strove  to  make  as  charming  as  possible  in  spite  of 
her  whims  and  her  wilfulness  and  her  unexpected 
transitions  of  temper  and  of  mood. 

It  is  now  approaching  a  score  of  years  since  the 
latest  of  these  novels  was  composed  and  I  can  look 
back  at  them  with  a  disinterestedness  not  easy  of 
attainment  when  they  were  fresh  from  the  work- 
shop. They  were  well  received  by  the  reviewers 
in  the  newspapers  and  by  my  fellow-craftsmen  in 
the  practice  of  fiction.  They  did  not  sell  badly, 
but  they  failed  to  become  "best  sellers."  Their 
merits  were  modest,  perhaps  too  modest  to  force 
them  outside  of  the  inner  circle  who  relish  deliberate 
workmanship.  I  am  inclined  to  think  now  that  they 
were  perhaps  a  little  too  quiet  in  tone,  too  subdued, 
too  moderate,  to  thrust  themselves  into  the  favor  of 
the  general  public. 

And  it  may  be  also  that  they  suffered  from  another 
defect  due  to  my  contemporary  practice  of  the  art 
of  the  drama;  they  were  perhaps  a  little  too  swift 
to  give  the  average  reader  the  time  needed  to  take 
in  the  full  meaning  of  what  was  said  and  of  what  was 
done.  The  dialog  had  the  compact  compression  de- 
manded by  the  rigid  limitation  of  time  in  the  theater 
when  there  are  only  two  hours  for  the  traffic  of  the 
stage,  a  compression  unnecessary  and  even  out  of 
place  in  the  more  leisurely  narrative  of  a  novel. 
That  is  to  say,  my  stories  lacked  the  dilation  and 
the  dilution  needed  in  pure  narrative  when  words 
and  deeds  are  not  reinforced  by  the  voice  and  the 


390  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

gesture  of  actors  actually  before  the  eye,  and  thus 
driving  home  every  point  by  dint  of  simultaneous 
visual  and  auditory  sensation. 

When  I  sat  down  to  write  one  after  another  of 
these  representations  of  life  in  New  York  as  I  saw 
it  and  as  I  interpreted  it,  I  had  no  belief  that  I  was 
engaged  in  creating  that  intangible  and  evasive 
entity,  the  Great  American  Novel,  for  I  was  not 
simple-minded  enough  to  suppose  that  I  had  it  in 
me  to  compass  this  feat;  and  I  had  already  come  to 
the  conclusion  that  these  United  States  were  too 
many  and  too  various  for  any  one  work  of  fiction 
ever  to  include  enough  of  their  many -colored  spec- 
trums  to  be  accepted  as  satisfactorily  representative 
of  the  whole  country.  It  has  always  seemed  to  me 
as  futile  and  as  foolish  to  aspire  after  the  Great 
American  Novel  as  it  would  be  to  try  and  decide 
which  is  the  Great  French  Novel  or  the  Great  British 
Novel.  Nor  when  I  undertook  my  three  studies  of 
life  in  this  city  did  I  even  feel  any  ambition  to  write 
the  Great  New  York  Novel,  for  I  knew  the  town 
well  enough  to  feel  assured  that  it  is  almost  as 
various  as  the  whole  country,  and  that  it  is  far 
too  complex  to  permit  any  one  novelist  to  concentrate 
the  essence  of  it  in  any  one  novel.  My  humbler 
attempt  was  to  fix  one  or  another  of  the  shifting 
scenes  of  life  in  this  great  city;  in  fact,  I  was  really 
seeking  the  same  goal  in  these  three  novels  that  I 
was  seeking  at  the  same  time  in  my  three  volumes 
of  the  'Vignettes,'  which  were  also  outlines  in  local 
color. 


CHAPTER  XVII 
A  PROFESSOR  OF  DRAMATIC  LITERATURE 


IT  has  seemed  best  to  deal  in  separate  chapters 
with  my  novel-writing,  my  play-writing,  and 
my  playgoing,  even  at  the  risk  of  a  slight 
confusion  in  the  direct  chronological  sequence  of 
these  records.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  my  playgoing 
and  play-writing  and  novel-writing  were  simul- 
taneous; and  contemporary  with  a  large  part  of  all 
three  of  them  was  another  series  of  experiences,  as 
a  lecturer  for  a  year  and  thereafter  as  a  professor 
at  Columbia  College.  In  the  spring  of  1891  H.  H. 
Boyesen  dropped  in  one  day  to  tell  me  that  the 
professor  of  English,  Thomas  R.  Price,  was  going 
to  be  absent  in  Europe  the  following  winter;  and 
he  inquired  if  I  would  entertain  a  proposition  to  act 
as  substitute  while  Price  was  away.  I  was  com- 
pletely taken  by  surprise  as  I  had  never  contemplated 
the  possibility  of  entering  the  teaching  profession, 
even  for  a  single  year. 

Yet  the  more  I  considered  the  suggestion  the 
better  I  liked  it.  Professor  Price  came  to  talk  it 
over  with  me;  and  not  long  after  I  had  a  conference 
with  Seth  Low,  who  had  assumed  the  presidency  of 
Columbia  only  a  few  months  before.  So  it  came 
about  that  when  the  college  began  its  year  in  Oc- 

391 


392  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

tober,  1891,  I  found  myself  engaged  to  conduct 
three  courses,  open  to  seniors  and  to  such  graduate 
students  as  might  present  themselves.  And  in  the 
following  spring  the  trustees  created  a  new  pro- 
fessorship of  literature,  to  which  I  was  appointed. 
I  may  anticipate  here  to  record  that  the  title  of  my 
chair  was  changed  in  1899,  when  I  became  pro- 
fessor of  dramatic  literature  —  mine  being,  so  far 
as  I  know,  the  first  professorship  of  the  drama  to  be 
founded  in  any  English-speaking  university. 

There  is  an  Arab  proverb  to  the  effect  that  "No 
man  is  called  of  God  till  he  is  forty."  Whatever 
the  wisdom  of  this  assertion  —  and  it  would  be  easy 
to  cite  abundant  evidence  in  its  support  —  it  was 
my  good  fortune  to  enter  upon  a  new  kind  of  work  in 
the  very  year  when  I  had  attained  the  age  of  two- 
score.  The  profession  for  which  my  father  had 
trained  me  I  had  never  been  permitted  to  practise, 
and  the  profession  for  which  I  had  trained  myself  I 
had  been  able  to  practise  only  intermittently.  Now, 
when  five  of  my  years  had  elapsed  beyond  the  half 
of  the  allotted  threescore  and  ten,  I  found  myself 
engaged  in  the  practice  of  a  third  profession  for 
which  I  had  had  no  training  at  all;  and  it  is  in  the 
practice  of  this  third  profession  that  I  have  spent 
now  more  than  a  quarter  of  a  century. 

Not  only  had  I  had  no  experience  in  teaching  but 
I  had  never  been  called  upon  to  consider  its  prin- 
ciples or  to  bestow  on  it  even  cursory  attention. 
I  knew  a  dozen  or  more  of  the  teaching  staff  of  Co- 
lumbia whom  I  had  met  at  the  Authors  Club  and 
elsewhere;  but  my  talks  with  them  had  never 


DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  393 

chanced  to  turn  on  the  principles  or  the  practice 
of  the  art  of  education.  All  that  I  really  knew 
was  that  teaching  was  truly  an  art  and  that  there- 
fore I  should  have  to  acquire  it  somehow  —  and  prob- 
ably at  the  expense  of  my  earliest  classes.  For- 
tunately, during  that  first  year  when  I  was  serving 
as  a  substitute  for  Professor  Price  I  was  allowed  to 
choose  the  subjects  of  my  three  courses  of  lectures; 
and  therefore,  as  I  selected  American  literature, 
modern  fiction,  and  English  versification,  three  topics 
with  which  I  was  already  fairly  familiar,  I  had  not 
to  get  up  the  matter  of  my  instruction,  being  thereby 
free  to  devote  my  whole  energy  to  the  manner 
whereby  I  might  best  convey  to  the  members  of  my 
classes  what  I  had  to  impart. 

It  is  evidence  of  my  lack  of  acquaintance  with 
the  program  of  studies  in  American  colleges  when  I 
began  to  teach  that  I  selected  these  three  topics, 
which  were  all  three  of  them  almost  if  not  quite 
absent  from  college  catalogs  at  that  time.  There 
were  one  or  two  professors  in  the  English  department 
of  Dartmouth  and  of  Cornell,  for  example,  who  were 
already  considering  the  careers  of  the  chief  American 
poets  and  prose-writers;  but  these  were  not  more 
than  two  or  three  at  the  most  in  those  distant  days, 
common  as  is  the  consideration  of  our  American 
authors  now  in  all  our  larger  colleges.  As  for  the 
course  on  the  evolution  of  the  modern  novel,  I  am 
inclined  to  doubt  if  I  had  any  predecessor  or  even 
for  several  years  any  competitor.  And  the  third 
course,  that  on  English  versification,  might  have 
been  described  as  "metrical  composition,"  since  it 


394  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

was  designed  to  parallel  the  prescribed  courses  in 
the  theory  and  practice  of  rhetoric,  my  intention 
being  to  tempt  the  students  into  various  kinds  of 
verse-making,  not  with  any  absurd  hope  of  develop- 
ing them  into  poets,  but  mainly  because  I  believed 
metrical  composition  to  be  an  excellent  discipline 
for  prose-writing.  This  was  also  a  novelty;  and 
even  now  it  is  not  as  frequent  as  it  might  be.  Here 
also  I  may  note  that  in  my  second  year  at  Columbia, 
that  is  in  the  fall  of  1892, 1  announced  a  fourth  course 
on  the  dramatists  of  the  nineteenth  century,  a  topic 
not  at  that  time  treated  in  any  other  college.  Of 
course,  no  one  of  these  courses  was  deliberately 
given  because  of  its  novelty.  They  were  all  four 
announced  solely  because  their  subjects  were  those 
with  which  I  had  made  myself  most  familiar.  In 
my  diffidence  on  the  threshold  of  a  new  career  I 
wanted  to  advance  as  easily  as  might  be  along  the 
line  of  least  resistance.  In  so  far  as  I  may  have 
been  a  pioneer  into  little-explored  regions,  my  pio- 
neering was  wholly  without  malice  prepense. 

Recalling  the  dull  drudgery  in  my  own  under- 
graduate days  over  the  lamentable  manual  from  the 
dry  pages  of  which  we  were  supposed  to  derive  the 
dead  facts  of  English  literature,  I  eschewed  the  use 
of  any  text-book,  requiring  my  classes  to  read  for 
themselves  and  encouraging  them  to  form  their  own 
opinions  about  the  books  they  read.  Quite  possi- 
bly I  began  by  demanding  of  them  more  pages  than 
they  could  very  well  digest;  but  at  all  events  I  was 
acting  in  accordance  with  the  sound  principle  that, 
if  they  were  exposed  to  the  contagion  of  literature, 


DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  395 

some  of  them  might  catch  it.  And  I  hoped  that  my 
own  lively  appreciation  of  the  writings  of  most  of 
the  authors  I  asked  them  to  read  might  awaken  in 
at  least  some  of  them  a  kindred  enjoyment.  I  had 
written  novels  and  plays  myself,  and  if  I  was  no  poet 
I  was  none  the  less  responsible  for  a  good  deal  of 
rime,  whatever  its  value;  and  so  I  had  no  hesitation 
in  taking  them  into  the  workshop  and  in  talking  to 
them  about  technic.  And  however  little  beneficial 
my  instruction  may  have  been  to  my  students,  it 
was  highly  profitable  to  me,  for  in  teaching  them  I 
soon  discovered  that  I  was  perpetually  learning 
myself.  I  was  constantly  spurred  to  the  acquisition 
of  wider  information  by  the  necessity  of  meeting  the 
eager  inquiries  of  intelligent  youth. 


II 

I  went  back  to  Columbia  exactly  twenty  years 
after  I  had  been  graduated  with  the  class  of  '71; 
and  the  college  I  found  on  my  return  was  very  dif- 
ferent from  the  college  I  had  left.  There  was  a  new 
spirit  in  the  air;  the  many  changes  which  had  taken 
place  during  the  score  of  years  while  I  had  been  ab- 
sent were  so  surprising  as  to  be  almost  startling. 
I  had  left  Columbia  when  it  was  still  a  lazy  little 
college,  almost  asleep,  and  almost  devoid  of  any 
ambition  to  make  itself  worthy  of  the  great  city  in 
which  it  was  placed.  I  found  it  awake  and  active 
and  ambitious  and  acutely  alive  to  its  future  possi- 
bilities. The  seed  planted  by  President  Barnard 


396  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

had  at  last  begun  to  fructify;  the  sound  doctrine 
he  had  preached  to  unheeding  ears  year  after  year 
in  his  reports  (which  are  now  accepted  as  educa- 
tional classics)  had  won  wider  recognition;  and  a 
few  of  the  plans  he  had  proposed  were  on  the  point 
of  being  carried  out. 

When  I  had  been  a  student  the  college  was  suffi- 
cient unto  itself;  the  scientific  school  was  establish- 
ing its  right  to  exist;  the  law  school,  semi-proprietary 
as  it  was,  housed  itself  unworthily  at  a  distance  of  two 
miles;  and  the  medical  school,  the  College  of  Physi- 
cians and  Surgeons,  wholly  proprietary,  had  only  a 
nominal  connection  with  Columbia.  When  I  began 
to  lecture  I  found  that  the  scientific  school  had  come 
into  its  own;  that  the  law  school  was  sumptuously 
sheltered  in  a  beautiful  building  in  the  college 
grounds;  that  a  movement  was  already  under  way 
to  incorporate  the  medical  school  more  intimately 
with  Columbia;  and  that  there  was  a  graduate 
school  of  political  science  with  a  gifted  group  of 
enthusiastic  professors  picked  by  the  unerring  dis- 
cretion of  its  dean,  John  W.  Burgess,  in  whose 
prophetic  eye  there  was  the  vision  of  a  Columbia 
proportionate  to  the  opportunities  and  the  responsi- 
bilities due  to  her  position  in  the  metropolis.  There 
was  even  a  graduate  school  already  in  existence  for 
guiding  advanced  students  in  literature,  in  linguis- 
tics, and  in  philosophy ;  and  the  young  dean  of  this 
school  of  philosophy,  Nicholas  Murray  Butler,  was 
a  sturdy  supporter  of  the  advances  advocated  by 
Barnard. 

At  the  center  of  all  these  activities  and  expansions, 


DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  397 

and  serving  as  the  foundation  of  them  all,  was  the 
historic  college  with  its  four-year  course,  already  far 
more  flexible  and  far  richer  in  its  offerings  than  it 
had  been  in  my  time.  Perhaps  it  was  in  the  college 
itself  that  the  signs  of  new  life  were  most  abundant 
and  most  obvious;  and  yet  the  relations  of  the  old 
college  to  the  auxiliary  institutions  it  had  mothered 
were  insecure  and  anomalous.  The  legal  name  of 
this  clutter  of  schools  was  still  Columbia  College, 
yet  all  the  essential  elements  of  a  real  university 
were  at  hand;  and  I  had  not  long  been  connected 
with  the  institution  before  it  asserted  itself  and 
assumed  the  style  and  title  of  Columbia  University, 
restoring  to  the  earlier  entity  out  of  which  it  had 
developed  by  force  of  circumstances  and  in  the 
course  of  time,  the  historic  title  of  Columbia  College. 
I  came  on  the  scene  in  time  to  behold  the  actual 
creation  of  the  university  and  to  see  it  "pawing  the 
earth,  its  hinder  parts  to  free." 

The  Columbia  I  had  known  in  my  youth  had  a 
faculty  of  less  than  ten,  nearly  all  of  whom  I  recalled 
as  well  advanced  in  years.  The  Columbia  which  I 
joined  had  a  faculty  of  two  or  three  hundred,  the 
most  of  whom  were  still  young,  with  the  best  of  their 
work  before  them.  In  the  Columbia  I  dimly  re- 
membered we  spoke  with  awe  of  Drisler's  contri- 
butions to  the  Greek  lexicon  of  Liddell  and  Scott, 
revering  this  as  the  sole  outward  and  visible  sign  of 
authorship  connected  with  the  college.  In  the  Co- 
lumbia to  which  I  returned  there  was  an  incessant 
productivity;  and  a  dozen  at  least  of  my  colleagues 
were  members  of  the  Authors  Club.  It  was  a  highly 


398  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

stimulating   society   into   which   1    was   welcomed; 
and  its  atmosphere  was  electric. 

The  movement  in  advance  had  been  in  progress 
for  several  years  before  I  arrived  to  take  part  in  it; 
and  already  the  activities  of  the  rejuvenated  insti- 
tution were  so  many  and  so  energetic  that  they  were 
cramped  for  space  in  the  indecorous  old  buildings 
which  made  a  sorry  appearance  by  the  side  of  the 
stately  and  towering  edifice  which  housed  the  li- 
brary and  the  law  school,  and  the  more  recently 
erected  Hamilton  Hall  wherein  Professor  Price  had 
the  study  I  was  privileged  to  occupy  in  his  absence. 
If  Columbia  should  be  forced  to  remain  where  it 
was,  confined  to  a  single  small  city  block,  beside 
which  ran  the  shrieking  and  hissing  locomotives  of 
a  triple  railroad,  its  future  would  be  strangled.  And 
in  the  winter  of  my  return  the  far-seeing  clerk  of 
the  Board  of  Trustees,  John  B.  Pine,  urged  the  dar- 
ing move  to  Morningside  Heights,  a  move  soon 
resolved  upon  and  finally  accomplished  six  years 
later,  in  1897,  when  Columbia  took  possession  of  its 
artistically  planned  new  buildings  on  the  spacious 
grounds  of  the  Bloomingdale  Asylum,  as  it  had 
taken  over  in  1859  the  old  buildings  of  the  Asylum 
for  the  Deaf  and  Dumb.  An  autobiography  like 
this  must  not  be  permitted  to  become  a  history  of 
Columbia  University,  however  tempting  the  oppor- 
tunity may  appear;  but  it  is  only  fit  that  the  auto- 
biographer  should  set  down  here  his  own  delight  in 
having  been  an  eye-witness  of  the  logical  and  irre- 
sistible expansion  of  the  educational  institution  with 
which  the  last  years  of  his  life  have  been  so  closely 


DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  399 

connected.  His  own  share  in  this  outflowering 
from  an  ancient  root  has  been  minimal;  but  he  has 
always  rejoiced  at  being  allowed  to  behold  a  spec- 
tacle so  nobly  encouraging  and  so  typically  American 
as  the  sudden  transformation  of  an  old  and  weak 
college  into  a  new  and  strong  university,  aspiring 
in  spirit  as  well  as  ample  in  numbers. 


Ill 

In  1891  the  large  college  clubs  which  now  flourish 
in  New  York  had  not  been  founded;  and  the  alumni 
associations  of  Harvard,  Yale,  Princeton,  and  Co- 
lumbia held  annual  dinners  in  the  fall  and  early 
winter  at  each  of  which  representatives  of  the 
other  three  societies  were  invited  to  speak.  The 
Columbia  dinner  took  place  in  the  middle  of  De- 
cember, and  I  was  asked  to  "improve  the  occasion" 
with  a  few  remarks.  As  I  was  allowed  to  choose 
my  topic  I  selected  'Twenty  Years'  Changes  at  Co- 
lumbia,' and  for  once  in  my  life  I  reaped  the  bounti- 
ful reward  of  the  spellbinder.  What  I  had  to  de- 
scribe to  my  fellow-alumni  was  news  to  most  of 
those  present  and  it  was  interesting  to  all  of  them; 
and  thus  it  happened  that  the  bearer  of  glad  tidings 
received  the  guerdon  of  applause  as  if  he  himself 
had  brought  about  the  happy  state  of  affairs  he  was 
merely  reporting  upon. 

This  is  a  phenomenon  often  to  be  observed  at 
public  dinners;  and  I  came  to  the  conclusion  later 
that  a  speech  cannot  fail  to  be  fairly  successful  if 
only  it  contains  what  the  speaker  himself  wants  to 


400  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

say  to  that  special  audience,  and  if  this  is  what  that 
audience  wants  to  hear  from  him.  If  there  is  not 
this  community  of  desire,  the  speaker  may  enjoy 
his  own  orating  but  the  listeners  are  likely  to  be 
wearied  by  words  having  no  special  appeal  to  them; 
the  prosperity  of  a  speech  lies  in  the  ears  of  them 
that  hear  it.  It  would  have  been  well  for  me  in 
1891  if  I  had  firmly  grasped  this  fundamental  prin- 
ciple then  and  if  I  had  been  guided  by  it.  Be- 
cause my  remarks  had  been  listened  to  with  more  or 
less  interest  at  the  dinner  of  the  Columbia  Alumni, 
I  was  requested  to  go  to  the  dinner  of  the  Harvard 
Alumni,  as  the  representative  of  Columbia.  I  went 
with  a  light  heart  and  I  came  home  with  my  vanity 
trailed  in  the  dust.  To  the  Columbia  men  I  had 
something  to  say,  a  message  to  deliver,  a  report  to 
make,  something  that  I  really  wanted  to  utter  to 
them  and  that  they  were  glad  to  hear  from  me.  At 
the  Harvard  dinner  I  had  nothing  to  say  altho  I 
had  to  rise  and  say  something.  I  had  no  message 
and  no  report  welcome  to  Harvard  ears;  and  these 
ears  listened  to  me  only  out  of  politeness.  My  glib 
utterances  fell  into  a  frosty  void;  they  echoed  in  my 
own  ears  like  the  hollow  crackling  of  thorns  under  a 
pot;  and  to  intensify  the  misfortune  of  the  mis- 
adventure into  which  my  thoughtlessness  had  led  me, 
I  spoke  sandwiched  between  Phillips  Brooks  and  the 
modest  captain  of  the  triumphant  football-team. 

I  had  already  agreed  to  go  later  also  to  the  Yale 
dinner,  but  I  had  taken  the  warning  to  heart;  and 
for  years  now  I  have  refused  to  stand  and  deliver, 
unless  I  at  least  believe  that  I  have  something  to 


DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  401 

say  that  the  special  gathering  I  am  asked  to  address 
will  be  willing  to  hear.  Now  and  again  I  have  fool- 
ishly yielded  to  friendly  pressure  and  to  the  insidi- 
ous plea:  "You  can  say  something  —  you  can  say 
anything  you  want  to  say."  And  when  I  have  ac- 
cepted these  invitations  and  found  too  late  that 
there  was  nothing  I  really  wanted  to  say,  I  have 
observed  that  however  courteously  the  listeners 
may  have  endeavored  to  disguise  their  lack  of  in- 
terest in  what  I  managed  to  utter,  their  endeavors 
were  no  more  successful  than  my  speech. 

It  may  be  noted,  however,  that  these  comments 
on  the  conditions  of  profitable  offhand  speaking, 
and  on  proffering  a  few  remarks  after  dinner,  must 
not  be  supposed  to  apply  to  more  formal  and  stately 
occasions,  a  commemorative  oration  or  an  address 
before  the  Phi  Beta  Kappa.  To  such  more  dignified 
meetings  the  audience  comes  in  an  altogether  dif- 
ferent frame  of  mind  and  with  an  altogether  different 
expectation;  and  the  speaker  is  then  encouraged 
to  do  his  best,  to  be  grave  and  serious,  to  voice 
afresh  the  perennial  platitudes  and  to  clothe  anew 
the  everlasting  commonplaces,  if  only  he  himself 
firmly  believes  that  he  is  reflecting  new  light  on  the 
eternal  verities. 

In  the  course  of  my  quarter  century  in  the  service 
of  Columbia  I  have  been  drafted  once  to  give  a  Phi 
Beta  Kappa  address  and  again  once  to  give  a  some- 
what similar  address  at  the  opening  of  the  institu- 
tion in  the  fall.  For  executive  and  for  administra- 
tive positions  I  developed  no  aptitude;  and  for 
committee  work  I  had  no  liking.  As  a  mere  matter 


402  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

of  record  I  may  set  down  here  that  I  have  been  a 
trustee  of  the  Columbia  University  Press  since  its 
foundation  in  1893,  that  I  served  as  editor  of  the 
Columbia  University  Quarterly  for  a  year,  and  that 
I  was  the  chairman  of  a  committee  to  bring  out  a 
history  of  the  university  published  when  Columbia 
celebrated  the  hundred  and  fiftieth  anniversary  of 
the  founding  of  King's  College.  When  Bunner  died 
in  1896,  others  of  his  friends  joined  with  me  in  raising 
a  memorial  fund  sufficient  to  provide  a  gold  medal 
to  be  awarded  annually  to  the  candidate  for  a 
Columbia  degree  who  should  submit  the  best  essay 
on  an  assigned  topic  in  the  history  of  American 
literature;  and  I  am  inclined  to  believe  that  the  H.  C. 
Bunner  Medal  was  the  earliest  reward  offered  in  any 
of  our  colleges  for  research  in  the  American  branch 
of  English  literature. 

In  1899,  when  my  title  was  changed  to  professor 
of  dramatic  literature,  a  department  of  English  was 
created  with  Price  as  its  chairman  and  with  the  late 
George  Rice  Carpenter  as  its  secretary.  As  the 
university  has  grown  with  the  expansion  of  its 
three  colleges,  Columbia,  Barnard,  and  Teachers, 
with  the  development  of  graduate  work  in  the  school 
of  philosophy,  and  with  the  establishment  of  the 
School  of  Journalism,  new  professors  have  been  added 
to  the  department  of  English  until  there  are  now 
more  than  a  score  of  us  —  twice  as  many  in  this 
single  department  as  there  were  in  the  whole  college 
when  I  was  an  undergraduate.  After  the  death  of 
Price,  the  first  chairman,  the  office  was  abolished 
and  the  department  has  had  no  official  head,  exhibit- 


DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  403 

ing  itself  as  an  example  of  pure  democracy,  doing 
all  its  business  in  town-meeting.  Acting  as  a  unit, 
we  have  suggested  all  appointments  and  all  promo- 
tions, and  the  president  and  the  trustees  have 
favored  this  autonomy  in  so  far  as  the  resources  of 
the  budget  would  permit.  It  is  evidence  of  the 
cordiality  of  our  relations  with  one  another  and 
of  our  harmonious  opinions,  that  no  action  has  been 
taken  since  the  foundation  of  the  department  of 
English,  except  on  the  unanimous  vote  of  all  present. 
Nor  does  this  external  concord  conceal  any  factional 
jealousy;  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  several  members 
of  the  department  are  on  the  best  of  terms  with  one 
another  and  are  constantly  seeking  out  occasions  of 
service  to  one  another,  as  I  can  testify  on  repeated 
personal  experience  of  this  good-will. 


IV 

Altho  I  did  not  for  several  years  after  I  was  called 
to  Columbia  relinquish  the  writing  of  stories,  long 
and  short,  or  the  writing  of  plays,  the  natural  result 
of  my  professional  duties  was  to  detach  me  more 
or  less  from  creative  work  and  to  center  my  attention 
more  and  more  on  criticism.  The  necessity  of  nar- 
rating the  lives  of  authors  and  of  relating  their 
successive  publications  to  their  biographies  drew 
me  irresistibly  toward  literary  history  —  which  is 
not  a  brother  to  criticism  but  only  a  first  cousin. 
I  was  led  to  consider  the  evolution  of  the  American 
branch  of  English  literature,  and  to  see  in  it  the  most 


404  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

salient  and  the  most  significant  record  of  the  chang- 
ing temper  and  the  modifying  moods  of  the  American 
people. 

After  I  had  given  my  elementary  course  on  Ameri- 
can literature  for  three  or  four  years  I  contributed 
to  St.  Nicholas  a  series  of  papers  on  the  chief 
American  authors,  focussing  the  attention  of  the 
young  reader  on  the  men  themselves  with  the  firm 
hope  that  he  might  thereby  be  lured  into  the  reading 
of  their  works  for  his  own  enjoyment.  To  these 
papers,  published  in  a  juvenile  magazine,  I  added 
a  few  others,  and  thus  I  was  enabled  to  send  forth 
in  1896  an  'Introduction  to  the  Study  of  American 
Literature.'  I  hoped  to  have  this  adopted  as  a  text- 
book in  high  schools  but  I  desired  to  avoid  the 
aridity  of  the  manual  of  English  literature  that  I  still 
recalled  with  detestation  from  my  undergraduate 
days,  and  I  therefore  sought  to  give  a  human  interest 
to  the  schoolbook  by  adorning  it  with  portraits  of 
the  authors,  views  of  their  well-known  dwellings,  and 
reproductions  of  their  autographs  and  manuscripts. 
My  indurated  modesty  forces  me  to  ascribe  to  these 
devices,  which  were  then  novel,  the  continued  popu- 
larity of  the  little  book.  It  has  attained  to  a  cir- 
culation which  many  a  best  seller  might  envy, 
since  its  sale  was  a  quarter  of  a  million  copies  within 
twenty-five  years  after  it  appeared. 

This  primer,  for  such  the  'Introduction  to  the 
Study  of  American  Literature'  was  intended  to  be, 
was  the  first  book  which  was  the  immediate  con- 
sequence of  my  teaching;  but  it  was  not  to  be  the 
last.  It  had  grown  out  of  my  conduct  of  courses 


DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  405 

for  undergraduates;  and  my  time  was  divided  equally 
between  them  and  the  graduate  students  who  flocked 
to  Columbia  in  steadily  increasing  numbers.  I  was 
asked  to  give  a  graduate  course  on  the  development 
of  the  drama  from  JSschylus  to  the  Middle  Ages  to 
parallel  a  course  by  another  professor  on  the  evolu- 
tion of  criticism  from  Aristotle  to  the  Italian  Renas- 
cence; and  this  compelled  me  gladly  to  return  to 
the  Greek  texts  over  which  I  had  toiled  in  the 
persistent  search  for  the  second  aorist.  To  my 
delighted  surprise,  I  discovered  on  this  more  mature 
investigation  that  the  authors  of  'Agamemnon' 
and  'GEdipus'  and  'Medea'  were  playwrights  as 
well  as  poets,  and  that  the  author  of  the  'Frogs'  was 
a  precursor  of  Weber  and  Fields  in  addition  to  being 
the  lyrist  best  beloved  of  all  the  Greeks  by  Arthur 
Pendennis. 

I  had  totally  forgotten  my  very  early  ambition 
to  write  a  history  of  dramatic  literature  long  before 
I  set  to  work  to  prepare  ten  lectures  covering  the 
whole  'Development  of  the  Drama.'  Seven  of  these 
lectures  I  delivered  before  the  Brooklyn  Institute  of 
Arts  and  Sciences  in  the  winter  of  1902;  and  in  the 
spring  of  that  year  I  went  over  to  London  to  repeat 
three  of  them  at  the  Royal  Institution  in  Albemarle 
Street.  The  whole  series  appeared  as  a  book  in 
1903;  and  ten  years  later  I  was  greatly  gratified 
to  receive  a  Japanese  translation,  made  by  a  native 
of  Nippon  who  had  been  a  graduate  student  in  one 
of  my  classes. 

The  opening  lecture  in  this  volume  was  devoted 
to  a  discussion  of  the  principles  of  dramaturgic  crafts- 


406  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

manship,  all  of  which,  so  I  had  decided  to  my  own 
satisfaction,  could  be  deduced  from  the  fact  that 
every  dramatic  poet  has  devised  his  plays  with  the 
desire  and  intent  that  they  should  be  performed 
in  a  theater,  by  actors,  and  before  an  audience  — 
the  playhouse  of  his  own  time,  the  players  of  his  own 
country,  and  the  playgoers  of  his  own  race  being  the 
three  factors  which  necessarily  condition  his  work. 
A  few  years  after  this  chapter  had  appeared  in  the 
'Development  of  the  Drama,'  I  was  invited  to  pre- 
pare a  volume  in  which  my  body  of  doctrine  on 
dramaturgy  should  be  declared  in  more  detail;  and 
in  response  to  this  invitation  I  published  in  1910 
a  'Study  of  the  Drama'  in  which  I  set  in  serried 
array  the  principles  I  had  been  expounding  at  Co- 
lumbia ever  since  I  had  become  its  professor  of 
dramatic  literature. 

In  1911  I  followed  this  'Study  of  the  Drama' 
with  a  'Study  of  Versification,'  which  contained  the 
body  of  doctrine  on  practical  metrics  which  I  had 
developed  during  the  years  when  I  was  giving  the 
course  on  English  versification  to  successive  classes 
of  undergraduates.  My  course  on  the  modern 
drama  I  could  not  decant  in  a  volume  by  itself,  as 
the  course  had  been  given  for  the  first  time  at  least 
ten  years  after  I  had  published  my  consideration  of 
the  leading  'French  Dramatists  of  the  Nineteenth 
Century.'  But  I  had  never  let  out  of  my  mind  the 
ambition  to  deal  in  my  own  fashion  with  the  career 
and  with  the  achievements  of  the  master  of  French 
comedy;  and  after  I  had  profited  by  discussing  his 
successive  plays  with  successive  classes  of  keen- 


DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  407 

minded  and  well-equipped  graduate  students  —  a 
discussion  which  I  recognize  as  an  invaluable  gym- 
nastic —  I  set  to  work  at  last  to  tell  again  the  story 
of  Moliere's  harassed  life  and  to  study  anew  the 
specific  merits  of  his  several  plays.  When  the 
biography  was  completed,  I  extracted  from  it  or 
condensed  from  it  six  lectures  which  I  delivered  in 
Boston  before  the  Lowell  Institute  in  the  fall  of  1908; 
and  two  years  later  I  published  'Moliere;  His  Life  and 
His  Works,5  a  biography  which  had  this  novelty  at 
least,  that  it  dealt  with  the  dramatist  primarily  as 
a  playwright  and  only  secondarily  as  a  man  of 
letters.  Then  I  began  work  at  once  on  a  correspond- 
ing consideration  of  'Shakspere  as  a  Playwright,' 
which  was  published  in  the  fall  of  1913,  and  in  which 
I  expressly  refused  to  dwell  upon  his  poetry,  his 
philosophy,  and  his  psychology,  preferring  rather  to 
deal  with  him  as  a  playmaker  pure  and  simple,  an 
aspect  of  his  genius  often  neglected  by  those  of  his 
ardent  admirers  who  have  little  knowledge  of  stage- 
craft. 

Nor  are  these  the  only  books  due  in  large  part  to 
my  professorship  at  Columbia.  A  volume  entitled 
'Parts  of  Speech:  Essays  on  English,'  issued  in 
1901,  may  be  considered  as  a  continuation  of  the 
linguistic  investigations  begun  in  the  'American- 
isms and  Briticisms'  of  nine  years  earlier.  Other 
collections  of  essays,  however,  which  appeared  at 
irregular  intervals  after  I  was  called  to  Columbia  — 
'Aspects  of  Fiction'  (1896),  the  'Historical  Novel' 
(1901),  'Inquiries  and  Opinions'  (1907),  and  'Gate- 
ways to  Literature'  (1912) — reveal  in  their  pages 


408  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

the  influence  of  my  attempt  to  make  the  history 
of  literature  alive  by  an  incessant  consideration  of 
its  ever-advancing  technic. 


"From  forty  to  fifty  a  man  must  move  upward 
or  the  natural  falling  off  in  the  vigor  of  life  will  carry 
him  downward."  This  remark  of  Holmes's  seems 
to  be  shrewder  and  more  solidly  rooted  in  fact 
than  the  severer  assertion  of  Dr.  Osier,  that  a  man 
has  necessarily  done  his  best  wrork  before  he  reaches 
twoscore.  I  count  it  great  good  fortune  that  when 
I  was  forty  I  found  myself  practising  a  new  pro- 
fession, which  forced  me  into  unexpected  activities, 
thus  counteracting  the  natural  falling  off  in  the 
vigor  of  life. 

It  must  be  noted  that  Holmes  also  declared  the 
professor's  chair  to  be  "an  insulating  stool,  so  to 
speak;  his  age,  his  knowledge,  real  or  supposed,  his 
official  station,  are  like  the  glass  legs  which  support 
the  electrician's  piece  of  furniture  and  cut  it  off 
from  the  common  currents  of  the  floor  upon  which 
it  stands."  This  may  be  true  enough  in  a  medical 
or  technical  school  or  even  in  a  small  rural  college; 
but  it  is  less  true  in  a  huge  urban  university,  with 
its  stimulating  mass  of  graduate  students  with  whom 
a  professor  is  brought  into  an  intimate  contact 
rarely  possible  when  he  is  imparting  instruction 
solely  to  undergraduates  of  immature  years.  There 
is  no  keener  intellectual  exercise,  none  which  calls 
for  all  the  mental  celerity  that  a  man  may  possess, 


DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  409 

than  the  conducting  of  a  class  of  well-equipped 
graduate  students,  often  men  who  have  been  out  of 
college  for  several  years,  engaged  themselves  in 
teaching.  To  hold  their  interest,  to  win  their  re- 
spect, to  force  them  to  do  their  own  thinking,  the 
professor  has  to  put  forth  all  his  energy.  He  can- 
not afford  to  let  these  alert  investigators,  eager  and 
ardent  to  acquire,  catch  him  unawares.  He  cannot 
override  them  by  his  age,  his  official  station,  his 
knowledge,  real  or  supposed.  He  cannot  but  be 
aware  that  they  are  forever  "sizing  him  up,"  as  the 
phrase  is;  and  he  must  do  his  best  to  "make  good," 
as  they  put  it  in  their  direct  vernacular. 

He  has  to  guide  their  inquiries  into  the  subject- 
matter  of  the  course  and  to  train  them  to  push  their 
investigations  further  after  they  have  left  him. 
And,  above  all,  is  it  his  bounden  duty  to  force  them 
to  form  their  own  judgments  upon  the  works  they 
are  called  upon  to  analyze.  The  highest  compli- 
ment I  ever  received  from  a  graduate  student,  and 
therefore  the  most  grateful  to  my  ears,  was  the 
remark  that  I  had  made  it  clear  to  him  that  it  was 
not  only  his  right  to  have  his  own  opinion  about  the 
successive  masterpieces  we  had  been  discussing  in 
class,  but  also  his  duty  to  come  to  a  conclusion  of 
his  own.  What  the  professor  needs  to  bear  in  mind 
always  is  that  it  is  for  him  to  give  his  students  a 
grasp  on  the  principles  of  criticism  so  firm  that  they 
can  be  trusted  to  form  sound  conclusions  of  their 
own. 

Not  only  have  I  profited  incessantly  by  close  con- 
tact with  alert  graduate  students,  gathered  in  a  little 


410  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

group  about  my  table  and  doing  their  share,  each  of 
them,  in  the  discussions  we  were  constantly  starting, 
but  I  have  also  found  keen  stimulus  in  my  associa- 
tion with  my  fellow-professors.  In  the  quarter  of 
a  century  in  which  I  have  been  connected  with 
Columbia,  the  university  has  kept  on  expanding 
and  branching  out  into  new  fields.  The  student 
body  has  gone  on  increasing  year  after  year;  and 
this  has  compelled  a  corresponding  increase  in  the 
teaching  staff.  The  professors  giving  instruction  in 
Columbia  College  when  I  was  graduated  in  1871 
were  less  than  ten  in  number;  and  when  I  returned 
in  1891  to  join  them,  I  discovered  that  I  was  to  have 
two  or  three  hundred  colleagues.  After  twenty- 
six  years  of  teaching  I  find  that  the  number  of 
officers  of  instruction  has  swollen  to  about  eight 
hundred.  Even  when  I  joined  them,  most  of  these 
new  colleagues  were  younger  than  I;  and  as  I  have 
grown  older  with  the  passing  of  the  years,  I  have  had 
the  privilege  of  association  with  a  steadily  increas- 
ing group  of  men,  interested  in  the  things  I  have  at 
heart,  earnest  and  ambitious,  and  representing  a 
generation  later  than  mine  and  intermediary  be- 
tween my  own  maturity  and  the  immaturity  of  the 
undergraduates  of  the  college.  This  contact  with 
those  who  still  had  the  best  years  of  their  lives 
before  them,  has  been  steadily  stimulating  for  a 
senior  in  the  craft,  and  wholesome  in  that  it  tended 
to  prevent  an  elder  from  premature  stiffening  and 
hardening  of  the  mental  muscles. 

In  my  persistent  playgoing  it  has  amazed  me  to 
note  that  there  seems  to  have  been  evolved  in  our 


DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  411 

theater  a  definite  type  of  stage-professor,  as  sum- 
mary and  as  regardless  of  the  fact  as  the  stage- 
Irishman  or  the  stage-Frenchman.  This  traditional 
figure  represents  a  foolish  and  unworldly  person, 
quite  unable  to  take  care  of  himself,  and  brought 
forward  as  a  butt  for  unsympathetic  laughter. 
Whenever  I  have  joined  in  the  mirth,  I  did  it  with 
my  withers  unwrung  and  wondering  where  the 
hasty  playwright  had  ever  seen  any  one  remotely 
resembling  the  character  he  had  projected  on  the 
boards.  Possibly  a  few  of  the  more  obvious  traits 
of  the  stage-professor  may  have  been  borrowed  from 
some  occupant  of  a  chair  in  a  very  rural  college; 
but  I  doubt  it.  The  stage-professor  seems  to  me  to 
be  of  imagination  all  compact.  Certainly  I  have 
never  discovered  among  my  Columbia  colleagues 
any  one  who  had  any  of  the  characteristics  which 
combine  to  make  the  theatrical  type  a  figure  of  fun. 
Indeed,  I  incline  to  the  belief  that  we  have  de- 
veloped at  Columbia  a  professor  of  a  kind  not  likely 
to  exist  except  in  a  university  which  happens  to 
be  incorporated  in  a  great  city.  In  little  and  remote 
country  colleges  the  teaching  staff  may  possibly 
share  a  little  in  the  rusticity  of  their  neighbors;  and 
in  like  manner  the  professors  in  a  large  city  univer- 
sity are  likely  to  acquire  a  sort  of  urbanity  by  con- 
tagion from  those  who  surround  them  and  with 
whom  they  are  likely  to  have  many  points  of  con- 
tact. At  Columbia  the  professor  is  not  uncommon 
who  is  both  urban  and  urbane,  who  is  not  only  a 
gentleman  and  a  scholar,  in  the  good  old  phrase, 
but  also  more  or  less  a  man  of  the  world  and  even 


412  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

on  occasion  a  man  of  affairs.  There  is  one  whose 
skill  in  finance  is  so  well  known  that  he  was  prof- 
fered the  presidency  of  a  trust  company  at  a  salary 
several  times  that  which  he  was  receiving,  in  spite  of 
which  he  declined  the  tempting  proposal. 

There  is  another  who  made  a  most  important 
invention  by  which  he  is  in  receipt  of  a  superb 
income.  There  are  at  least  half-a-dozen  more  who 
have  inherited  comfortable  fortunes  and  who  have 
none  the  less  preferred  the  professor's  chair  to  a 
seat  on  the  box  of  a  four-in-hand.  And  in  my 
own  department,  that  of  English  and  Comparative 
Literature,  there  are  four  or  five  who  serve  as 
literary  advisers  to  as  many  different  publishing 
houses,  thus  evidencing  their  possession  of  a  fair 
share  of  practicality. 

So  far  as  I  have  been  able  to  form  an  opinion,  there 
is  no  university  in  the  United  States  where  the  posi- 
tion of  the  professor  is  pleasanter  than  it  is  at  Co- 
lumbia. The  students,  graduate  and  undergraduate, 
are  satisfactory  in  quality;  and  their  spirit  is  excel- 
lent. The  teaching  staff  is  so  large  that  it  is  gen- 
erally possible  for  each  of  us  to  cover  that  part  of 
his  field  in  which  he  is  most  keenly  interested.  Our 
relations  with  each  other  and  with  the  several  deans 
and  the  president  and  the  trustees  are  ever  friendly. 
So  long  as  we  do  our  work  faithfully  we  are  left  alone 
to  do  it  in  our  own  fashion.  And  we  have  all  of  us 
the  Lernfreiheit  and  the  Lehrfreiheit,  the  liberty 
of  the  soul  and  of  the  mind,  which  was  once  the 
boast  of  the  German  universities,  but  which  has  been 
lost  of  late  under  the  rigidity  of  Prussian  autocracy. 


DRAMATIC  LITERATURE  413 

It  seems  to  me  that  a  man  is  happily  situated  in 
life  if  he  finds  himself  set  to  do  the  work  that  he 
likes  best,  if  he  can  do  this  work  to  the  satisfaction 
of  his  associates,  and  if  he  is  in  receipt  of  a  living 
wage,  sufficient  for  the  needs  of  his  family.  It  is  a 
notorious  fact  that  the  teacher  is  lamentably  under- 
paid, in  our  schools,  in  our  colleges,  and  in  our  uni- 
versities; but  it  is  a  fact  also  that  this  condition  is 
now  recognized  and  that  it  is  therefore  likely  to  be 
remedied  sooner  or  later. 


CHAPTER  XVIII 
LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES 


Ait  has  seemed  convenient  to  compress  into  a 
single  chapter  a  summary  account  of  my 
connection  with  Columbia  University,  so 
it  is  also  advisable  for  me  now  to  group  together 
my  scattered  recollections  of  successive  summer 
trips  to  Europe.  In  1883,  Lowell  was  still  our 
official  representative  in  London,  doing  his  utmost 
always  to  better  the  public  and  the  private  relations 
of  the  United  States  with  the  British  Empire,  and 
never  willing  to  allow  anything  to  be  said  in  his 
presence  that  might  seem  to  reflect  on  his  own 
country.  He  was  accused  more  than  once  of  being 
a  little  too  friendly  with  the  British;  yet  some  of 
his  many  British  friends  thought  that  he  was  unduly 
sensitive,  not  to  call  it  touchy,  in  his  alertness  to 
detect  any  covert  comparison  which  might  strike 
him  as  disparaging  to  America.  Colonel  Eustace 
Balfour,  of  the  London  Scottish  (who  was  a  son-in- 
law  of  the  Duke  of  Argyle) ,  once  confided  to  me  that 
when  Lowell  was  a  guest  at  Inverary,  the  house- 
party  found  it  expedient  to  avoid  discussion  of 
American  topics  for  fear  of  arousing  the  jealous 
susceptibility  of  the  American  minister. 

414 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       415 

There  was  no  doubt  of  the  cordiality  of  Lowell's 
reception  by  all  classes  of  society  in  the  British  Isles. 
The  author  of  *  Jonathan  to  John'  was  made  to  feel 
at  home;  and  he  bore  himself  with  equal  cordiality 
and  dignity.  Indeed,  dignity  was  his  unfailing 
characteristic;  and  I  recall  the  shock  it  was  to  Lau- 
rence Hutton,  going  one  day  with  Henry  James 
to  pay  a  visit  to  Lowell,  and  finding  there  Chris- 
topher Pearse  Cranch,  who  had  dropped  in  to  see  his 
old  friend  and  who  called  him  "Jim."  It  was  dur- 
ing this  interview  that  Hutton  told  Lowell  of  a 
recent  visit  to  Cambridge,  where  he  had  called  on 
Mrs.  Ole  Bull,  the  tenant  of  Elmwood  while  its 
owner  was  away;  and  Lowell  asked  wistfully: 
"Do  the  trees  miss  me?" 

I  met  Lowell  first  at  an  afternoon  reception  at 
Lang's  in  June,  1883;  and  I  made  bold  to  ask  him 
how  he  was  getting  on  with  the  biography  of  Haw- 
thorne which  he  had  undertaken  for  the  American 
Men  of  Letters  series.  He  told  me  that  he  had  not 
yet  had  time  to  settle  down  to  it,  altho  he  was  glad 
that  he  had  undertaken  it.  He  added  that  he  had 
one  special  qualification  for  the  task  in  that  he 
was  a  New  Englander,  since  Hawthorne  could  be 
fully  comprehended  only  by  a  man  of  his  own 
section.  I  mentioned  Henry  James's  volume  on 
Hawthorne  in  the  English  Men  of  Letters  series,  and 
Lowell  smilingly  declared  that  to  be  a  very  inter- 
esting book  —  "but  Henry  James,  in  so  far  as  he  is 
an  American  at  all,  is  only  a  New  Yorker;  he  is 
certainly  not  a  New  Englander." 

Lowell  was  a  handsome  man,  a  fact  of  which  he 


416  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

could  not  be  unaware;  and  at  this  first  meeting  I 
was  struck  by  a  certain  fleeting  resemblance  to  E.  L. 
Godkin.  In  my  juvenile  indiscretion  I  ventured 
tactlessly  to  suggest  this  to  him.  "Ah,"  said  Lowell, 
smiling  humorously,  "but  that  is  the  sort  of  thing 
you  must  never  say.  It  won't  do  to  tell  any  man  that 
he  resembles  any  other  man;  he  may  not  care  for 
the  other  man's  looks !" 

Those  were  the  years  when  Walter  Besant  was 
engaged  in  establishing  the  Incorporated  Society  of 
Authors,  of  which  Tennyson  had  accepted  the  presi- 
dency; and  they  were  also  the  years  when  the  Amer- 
ican Copyright  League,  composed  of  our  own  writers 
with  Lowell  as  its  president,  was  working  incessantly 
for  a  law  to  secure  more  adequate  protection  in  the 
United  States  for  foreign  men  of  letters  and  for 
American  men  of  letters  in  foreign  countries.  Late 
in  July,  1888,  the  Incorporated  Society  of  Authors 
gave  a  dinner  to  Lowell  and  to  the  other  American 
authors  who  happened  to  be  in  London  that  summer, 
in  recognition  of  our  efforts  in  behalf  of  international 
copyright.  James  Bryce,  who  was  about  to  publish 
his  epoch-making  book  on  the  'American  Common- 
wealth,' was  the  chairman.  Lowell  made  one  of 
his  most  felicitous  speeches,  altho  he  began  by  con- 
fessing that  he  no  longer  went  to  a  dinner  with  a 
light  heart,  thinking  over  his  opening  remarks  in  the 
cab  and  relying  on  the  spur  of  the  moment  for  the 
rest  of  his  address.  He  discussed  the  vexed  ques- 
tion of  international  copyright  as  one  of  the  many 
difficulties  which  had  arisen  between  Great  Britain 
and  the  United  States.  He  admitted  that  there 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       417 

might  be  difficulties  which  were  serious,  altho  there 
were  not  likely  to  be  any  "which  good  sense  and  good 
feeling  cannot  settle."  Then,  with  an  irresistible 
smile,  he  went  on:  "I  think  I  have  been  told  often 
enough  to  remember  that  my  countrymen  are  apt 
to  think  that  they  are  in  the  right,  that  they  are 
always  in  the  right,  and  that  they  are  likely  to  look 
only  at  their  own  side  of  any  question.  Now,  this 
attitude  conduces  certainly  to  peace  of  mind  and 
imperturbability  of  judgment,  whatever  other  merits 
it  may  have.  I  am  sure  I  do  not  know  where  we 
got  it.  Do  you?"  And  an  immediate  roar  of 
laughter  proved  that  his  point  had  gone  home. 

Besant  had  asked  me  as  one  of  the  American  guests 
to  rise  after  Lowell  sat  down  and  to  propose  the 
health  of  our  British  hosts;  and  I  managed  to  say 
what  had  to  be  said  as  concisely  as  possible.  But 
when  I  got  on  my  feet  I  recognized  as  never  before 
the  validity  of  the  assertion  that  the  eyes  of  men 

After  a  well-graced  actor  leaves  the  stage, 
Are  idly  bent  on  him  that  enters  next, 
Thinking  his  prattle  tedious. 

It  happened,  when  the  dinner-party  broke  up  and 
we  were  regaining  possession  of  our  hats,  that  I 
found  myself  next  to  Lowell  and  I  could  not  resist 
telling  him  how  delightful  I  had  found  his  speech. 
"But  I  am  getting  old,"  he  answered;  "my  memory 
is  no  longer  what  it  used  to  be.  To-night  I  left  out 
half  my  good  things."  And  this  confession  con- 
firmed me  in  my  conviction  that  even  a  speaker  as 


418  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

richly  endowed  as  Lowell  and  as  apparently  spon- 
taneous could  not  forego  the  labor  of  proper  prep- 
aration. 


II 

Altho  we  ran  over  to  the  Continent  for  brief  visits 
to  Paris,  we  generally  spent  the  most  of  our  European 
summers  in  London ;  and  I  was  in  the  habit  of  lunch- 
ing at  the  Savile  several  times  a  week.  On  Saturdays 
I  was  likely  to  find  Walter  Besant,  always  a  most 
agreeable  companion,  kindly,  genial,  and  possessed 
of  both  humor  and  good  humor.  He  was  then 
living  at  Hampstead,  and  the  rear  of  his  garden 
jutted  out  into  Hampstead  Heath.  Once  when  he 
was  tending  his  flowers  he  overheard  a  fragment  of 
the  conversation  of  two  cockneys,  passing  along 
the  other  side  of  his  wall.  "Wot  did  you  do  then  ?" 
asked  one  voice,  and  promptly  another  voice  an- 
swered: "Wot  did  I  do?  I  told  'im  I'd  punch  'is 
bloody  'ead  if  'e  didn't  stop  'is  inter-bloody-f ering  ! " 
On  repeating  this  to  one  of  my  Grecian  colleagues 
at  Columbia  I  was  told  that  this  daring  device  for 
achieving  rhetorical  emphasis  was  sometimes  em- 
ployed by  the  Greeks  and  that  the  grammarians  had 
even  invented  a  name  for  it  —  tmesis. 

At  luncheon  one  day  late  in  the  eighties  I  happened 
to  tell  Besant  how  I  had  noticed  in  my  successive 
visits  to  the  Savile  that  I  found  a  gap  in  the  circle  of 
my  friends  there  every  time  I  came  back.  The  first 
year  it  was  Professor  E.  H.  Palmer  whom  I  missed, 
and  the  second  year  it  was  Professor  Fleeming  Jen- 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       419 

kin;  the  third  it  was  A.  J.  Duffield,  the  translator 
of  Cervantes,  and  the  fourth  it  was  Cotter  Morison, 
the  biographer  of  Gibbon.  When  I  arrived  at  the 
Savile  several  years  after  this  I  heard  that  Besant 
had  been  dangerously  ill;  and  when  he  turned  up  at 
luncheon  a  Saturday  or  two  later  he  told  me  that 
he  had  awakened  suddenly  one  night  when  his 
condition  was  most  threatening  with  the  thought: 
"Am  I  the  next  man  that  Brander  Matthews  is 
going  to  miss  when  he  comes  over?" 

I  recall  an  earlier  afternoon  when  Besant  and 
Cotter  Morison  and  I  chatted  cheerfully  over  our 
coffee  in  the  smoking-room  of  the  club.  When  Mor- 
ison left  us  at  last,  Besant  asked  me  if  I  had  noticed 
any  difference  in  the  manner  of  the  friend  who  had 
just  gone.  I  replied  that  I  had  not;  and  then  he 
told  me  that  Morison  had  been  making  ready  for 
years  to  write  a  history  of  France;  he  was  about  to 
begin  on  it  when  he  was  unexpectedly  conscious  of 
strange  symptoms,  so  he  had  gone  that  morning  to 
an  eminent  physician,  who  had  examined  him  very 
carefully  —  only  to  tell  him  finally  that  he  had  a 
fatal  disease  and  that  his  days  were  numbered. 
Morison  had  come  straight  to  the  Savile  and  he 
had  found  occasion  to  inform  Besant  that  he  would 
never  be  able  to  accomplish  what  had  been  the  ob- 
ject of  his  life.  Then  he  had  changed  the  subject 
as  I  joined  them  and  he  had  talked  to  us  both  as 
tho  he  were  not  under  sentence  of  death.  Not  long 
after  I  had  returned  to  America  in  the  fall,  I  saw  in 
the  papers  that  the  doctor's  prediction  had  come 
true. 


420  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Among  the  other  men  whom  I  met  at  the  Savile 
was  Arnold-Forster,  a  nephew  of  the  blind  states- 
man, Forster,  who  had  stood  our  friend  during  the 
civil  war.  Arnold-Forster  was  a  specialist  in  mili- 
tary affairs,  who  kept  himself  abreast  of  the  lat- 
est discoveries  in  science  and  was  always  glad  to 
supply  information  about  them.  It  is  the  custom 
of  the  Savile  that  any  one  attending  the  ordinary 
served  every  evening  at  two  long  tables  in  the 
dining-room  shall  feel  at  liberty  to  converse  freely 
with  his  neighbors  without  waiting  for  any  formal 
introduction.  One  evening  a  friend  of  mine  noticed 
that  Arnold-Forster  was  holding  forth  to  the  man 
sitting  next  to  him;  and  when  they  all  went  up- 
stairs for  their  coffee,  my  friend  said  to  him  that  he 
had  observed  the  animation  of  his  conversation. 
"Yes,"  the  insistent  disseminator  of  information 
explained,  "that  was  a  very  intelligent  man  next  to 
me;  and  he  seemed  to  be  very  much  interested." 

"What  were  you  talking  about?"  was  the  query. 

"Oh,  I  was  just  explaining  some  of  the  latest  dis- 
coveries in  astrophysics." 

My  friend  smiled  and  said:  "I  should  think  that 
he  might  be  interested  in  that.  Don't  you  know  who 
he  is  ?  —  Sir  Robert  Ball,  the  astronomer  royal  for 
Ireland." 

For  a  moment  the  imperturbability  of  Arnold- 
Forster  was  shattered.  Then  he  laughed  in  his 
turn  and  said:  "Isn't  that  just  like  me?" 

Another  of  my  Savile  friends  was  Charles  Villiers 
Stanford,  the  composer;  and  we  collaborated  on  a 
ballet  for  which  I  devised  a  libretto  and  for  which 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       421 

he  was  to  write  the  music.  The  project  was  cap- 
tivating; yet  now  after  an  interval  of  more  than  a 
score  of  years  I  fear  that  it  is  likely  to  remain  a 
project  only.  I  prepared  the  book  and  Stanford 
made  ready  the  themes  he  intended  to  employ  in 
the  score;  but  the  playwright  and  the  musician  are 
dependent  on  the  ballet-master,  who  has  to  elabo- 
rate the  pantomimic  suggestions  of  the  librettist  and 
to  indicate  to  the  composer  how  many  bars  must 
be  allotted  to  every  successive  episode.  Neither 
at  the  Alhambra  nor  at  the  Empire,  the  homes  of 
ballet  in  London,  was  Stanford  able  to  persuade  the 
chorographic  authorities  to  agree  to  produce  our 
joint  work.  I  confess  that  this  has  been  a  disappoint- 
ment, since  I  thought  there  would  be  a  certain 
piquancy  in  the  announcement  of  a  ballet  at  either 
the  Empire  or  the  Alhambra  (the  least  scholastic 
of  establishments  in  their  atmosphere),  having  its 
book  written  by  the  professor  of  literature  at  Co- 
lumbia University  and  its  score  composed  by  the 
professor  of  music  at  Cambridge  University. 

One  of  my  talks  with  Stanford  had  a  more  for- 
tunate outcome  for  him.  He  told  me  that  he  had 
once  planned  a  comic  opera  for  which  his  fellow- 
Irishman,  W.  G.  Wills  (the  author  of  the  'Charles 
the  First'  wherein  Irving  was  so  dignified  and  so 
pathetic),  was  to  prepare  the  book,  basing  it  on 
Sheridan  Lefanu's  dramatic  ballad,  'Shamus  O'Brien.' 
They  had  abandoned  their  scheme  when  Gilbert  and 
Sullivan  brought  out  'Trial  by  Jury,'  because  they 
did  not  dare  to  follow  that  with  a  musical  play  in 
which  a  court  scene  would  have  to  be  taken  very 


THESE  MANY  YEARS 

seriously.  I  suggested  that  this  difficulty  could 
have  been  removed  by  making  the  trial  in  'Shamus 
O'Brien'  a  drumhead  court-martial. 

"We  didn't  happen  to  think  of  that,"  Stanford 
said.  "And  now  it  is  too  late.  Wills  is  dead." 

Then  I  told  him  that  I  knew  another  Irish  play- 
wright, far  more  apt  for  a  work  of  this  kind  than 
Wills,  since  he  had  a  gift  for  writing  sparkling  lyrics; 
and  as  I  was  about  to  return  at  once  to  New  York, 
I  gave  Stanford  a  letter  of  introduction  to  George 
H.  Jessop  and  I  wrote  to  Jessop  to  prepare  him  for 
a  line  from  Stanford.  Before  I  got  out  of  sight  of 
land  the  composer  and  the  playwright  had  found 
one  another  and  had  started  to  work  on  the  comic 
opera.  At  their  second  meeting  Stanford  told  Jes- 
sop that  it  was  very  odd  it  had  needed  an  American 
to  make  them  acquainted  —  since  his  mother  had 
been  Jessop's  mother's  bridesmaid !  It  is  gratifying 
to  me  to  be  able  to  record  that  when  the  result  of 
this  collaboration  of  the  two  Irishmen  I  had  been 
instrumental  in  bringing  together  was  produced  at 
the  Opera-Comique  in  London,  in  1896,  it  met  with 
instant  success. 


Ill 

It  is  the  privilege  of  a  professor  at  Columbia  to 
have  a  sabbatical  vacation  every  seventh  year;  he 
can  take  a  whole  year  off  on  half -pay  or  he  can  have 
a  half-year  on  full  pay.  In  February,  1900,  I  took 
advantage  of  this  permission  to  pay  a  visit  to  Egypt 
and  to  Greece.  What  most  impressed  me  on  my 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       423 

trip  up  the  Nile  was  the  discovery  that  the  dwellers 
in  its  valley  are  very  much  the  same  to-day  that  they 
were  thousands  of  years  ago.  The  faces  and  the 
figures  of  the  men  who  passed  us  in  their  little  skiffs 
and  whom  we  saw  at  work  on  the  banks  were  iden- 
tical with  the  faces  and  the  figures  of  the  peasants 
depicted  in  the  wall-paintings  in  the  tombs  of  the 
Kings,  preserved  unimpaired  in  color  thru  twoscore 
centuries.  And  in  all  those  endless  years  the  native 
Egyptians  had  never  ruled  themselves.  When  I 
saw  them  they  were  governed  by  the  British,  who 
had  succeeded  the  Turks  and  who  had  had  as  usurp- 
ing predecessors  the  French,  the  Arabs,  the  Romans, 
the  Greeks,  and  the  Persians.  I  was  familiar  with 
Brunetiere's  assertion  that  the  essence  of  the  drama  is 
a  struggle,  that  it  must  display  the  clash  of  contend- 
ing desires,  and  that  it  flourishes  most  abundantly 
in  the  strong-willed  peoples  —  more  especially  at  the 
epochs  when  the  national  volition  has  been  stiff- 
ened. So  I  felt  that  if  this  theory  was  sound,  then 
a  weak-willed  race  like  the  Egyptians  were  unlikely 
ever  to  have  developed  a  drama  of  their  own.  My 
careful  search  in  the  museums  confirmed  me  in  this 
belief,  for  amid  all  the  relics  of  the  past  which  supply 
endless  information  about  the  Egyptians  of  old,  I 
could  find  nothing  which  seemed  to  imply  the  exist- 
ence of  a  drama  in  Egypt  even  in  its  most  primi- 
tive form. 

From  Egypt  we  went  to  Constantinople  and  then 
to  Athens,  where  I  had  the  pleasure  of  placing  my- 
self in  the  seat  reserved  for  his  priest  in  the  Theater 
of  Dionysus.  From  Athens  we  took  the  railroad 


424  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

to  Patras;  we  skirted  the  bay  of  Salamis,  we  crossed 
high  above  the  Corinth  canal,  and  then  we  ran  along 
all  day  by  the  edge  of  the  gulf  of  Corinth.  We 
were  in  a  comfortable  corridor-train;  and  in  our 
compartment  there  was  a  gentleman  of  a  somewhat 
swarthy  complexion,  whom  I  took  to  be  a  Parsee. 
It  turned  out  that  I  was  right  in  my  guess,  and  in 
the  course  of  the  day  we  fell  into  talk.  He  was 
from  Bombay.  He  spoke  excellent  English,  and 
he  was  evidently  a  man  of  education.  He  told  us 
that  he  had  been  down  the  day  before  to  have  a 
good  look  at  the  bay  of  Salamis.  "I  wanted  to  see 
the  place  where  my  ancestors  were  defeated  by  the 
Greeks,"  he  explained.  "Herodotus  says  that  there 
were  three  millions  of  us  —  but  then  Herodotus  was 
such  a  liar." 

From  Patras  we  crossed  to  Brindisi,  and  over  to 
Naples  and  on  to  Rome  and  to  Florence.  We 
went  out  one  afternoon  to  Fiesole,  where  I  wanted  to 
see  the  well-preserved  ruin  of  a  Roman  theater,  to 
which  we  were  conducted  by  a  little  ragamuffin. 
Tfris  juvenile  guide  was  polite  enough  to  pretend  to 
understand  my  scant  Italian;  and  he  had  apparently 
been  able  even  to  acquire  a  rudimentary  ability  to 
understand  English.  I  chanced  to  explain  to  my 
companions  that  I  had  not  seen  this  theater  in  any 
of  my  earlier  visits  to  Florence  and  that  it  had  per- 
haps been  newly  excavated.  The  Italian  imp,  who 
was  only  a  yard  or  so  in  front  of  me,  turned  suddenly 
as  he  caught  the  word  new;  and  with  a  horrified 
expression  he  cried  out:  "Non  nuovo,  signer;  antico, 
motto  antico!" 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       425 

From  Florence  we  went  to  Venice  and  thence  to 
Budapest  and  Vienna,  arriving  in  Paris  in  the  fresh 
fairness  of  the  spring,  a  little  after  the  exposition  had 
opened  its  doors.  I  had  seen  the  earlier  expositions 
in  1867  and  1878,  altho  I  had  unfortunately  been  un- 
able to  behold  that  of  1889.  The  exhibition  of  1900 
was  the  largest  of  all,  as  it  was  to  be  the  last,  the 
next  period  of  eleven  years  having  been  allowed 
to  pass  without  another  strenuous  effort  to  lure 
the  peoples  of  the  world  to  admire  again  the  un- 
paralleled beauty  of  Paris  and  the  surpassing  skill 
of  the  French  in  every  department  of  the  show  busi- 
ness. The  architecture  of  the  monumental  entrances 
of  the  exhibition  of  1900  and  of  the  several  tem- 
porary edifices  was  rather  flamboyant,  as  befitted 
a  glorified  and  gigantic  fair;  and  I  could  not  help 
contrasting  their  elaborate  artificiality  with  the 
chaste  severity  of  classic  design  which  had  charac- 
terized our  own  exhibition  of  1893.  There  was 
truth  as  well  as  humor  in  the  remark  that  Paris 
had  revelled  in  the  structural  novelty  which  might 
have  been  expected  in  Chicago,  whereas  Chicago 
had  revealed  the  respect  for  the  noble  traditions  be- 
queathed to  us  by  the  past  that  might  have  been 
expected  in  Paris. 

It  has  been  my  fortune  to  be  in  the  French  capital 
at  many  moments  of  excitement,  to  witness  the  visit 
of  Queen  Victoria  after  the  Crimean  war,  to  hear 
Thiers  assault  the  empire  in  1867,  to  be  present  on 
the  July  day  in  1870  when  war  was  declared  on 
Prussia  and  when  the  streets  were  thronged  with 
vociferous  mobs  shouting  "a  Berlin!  a  Berlin!"; 


426  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

to  be  present  again  six  weeks  later  when  the  news 
of  the  defeat  at  Sedan  brought  about  the  downfall 
of  the  empire  and  the  proclamation  of  the  republic; 
to  behold  the  interminable  funeral  processions  of 
Victor  Hugo,  in  1884,  and  of  Carnot,  in  1894.  In 
1900  the  excitement  was  once  more  intense  over  the 
Dreyfus  case;  and  the  ministry  of  Waldeck-Rous- 
seau,  which  was  displaying  the  courage  to  right  the 
grievous  wrong  done  to  an  innocent  man,  was  in 
imminent  danger  of  falling  and  perhaps  of  bringing 
down  in  its  ruins  the  republic  itself.  On  this  occa- 
sion, as  on  so  many  others,  courage  proved  to  be 
the  best  policy;  and  the  ministry  was  able  to  ride 
out  the  storm.  It  is  from  that  moment  that  the 
political  regeneration  of  France  may  be  dated. 

Coquelin  was  an  intimate  friend  of  Waldeck-Rous- 
seau,  as  he  had  been  an  intimate  friend  of  Gambetta; 
and  he,  like  all  the  friends  of  Gambetta,  was  earnest 
in  his  insistence  upon  justice  at  whatever  cost.  He 
had  the  certain  conviction  that  all  would  go  well, 
and  he  felt  free  to  plan  an  American  trip  for  the  fol- 
lowing season,  when  he  was  to  join  forces  with  Sarah- 
Bernhardt. 

"She  is  to  play  Roxane  for  me  in  c Cyrano  de 
Bergerac'  and  I  am  to  play  Flambeau  for  her  in 
'L'Aiglon' —  the  part  that  was  originally  written 
for  me,  altho  it  was  created  here  by  Guitry.  Then 
I  have  old  Duval  in  the  'Dame  aux  Camelias,'  as 
usual  —  a  very  small  part,  but  I  don't  mind  that,  as 
it  is  a  good  part,  what  there  is  of  it." 

I  told  him  I  had  heard  that  she  intended  to  ap- 
pear as  Hamlet;  and  I  asked  what  character  in 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       427 

Shakspere's  tragedy  he  proposed  to  impersonate. 
When  he  answered  that  he  would  have  to  con- 
tent himself  with  Polonius,  I  protested  at  once,  tell- 
ing him  that  the  part  was  quite  unworthy  of  him,  and 
that  it  was  a  feebler  character  even  than  it  seemed, 
being  indeed  what  the  French  call  a  false  good  part  — 
a  faux  bon  role.  He  confessed  that  he  knew  this, 
but  that  Polonius  seemed  to  be  the  only  character 
for  him,  since  he  had  to  appear  in  every  play. 

"Why  don't  you  undertake  the  Grave-digger?" 
I  inquired.  "Jefferson  has  just  done  it  again  at  an 
all-star  benefit  performance  in  New  York." 

"The  Grave-digger?"  he  returned.  "That's  an 
idea !  And  if  Jefferson  has  been  willing  to  do  it, 
I  don't  see  why  I  shouldn't.  I'll  look  at  it." 

When  I  saw  him  the  next  day,  I  found  him  quite 
enthusiastic. 

"You  were  right,"  he  said.  "The  Grave-digger 
is  an  admirable  character  —  rich  and  true.  Of 
course,  I  shall  play  him  —  and  I  think  I  can  make 
something  out  of  him.  Can  you  get  me  the  music  of 
his  song  ?  " 

I  sent  to  London  for  the  tune  which  is  traditional 
on  the  English-speaking  stage,  but  Coquelin  immedi- 
ately disapproved  of  it,  finding  it  lacking  in  character. 

"I  want  an  air  which  will  go  with  the  swing  of  a 
pickax,"  he  explained.  "I  must  have  a  tune  to  be 
punctuated  with  the  blows  of  the  Grave-digger's 
implement,  working  as  he  sings." 

He  said  that  he  would  get  one  of  his  musical 
friends  to  set  Shakspere's  song  for  him;  and  it  was 
characteristic  of  his  artistic  thoroness  that  not  until 


428  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

a  third  tune  had  been  composed  for  him  was  he 
satisfied  with  its  rhythm. 

I  may  note  here,  since  I  find  I  have  failed  to  re- 
mark it  earlier,  that  Coquelin's  keen  artistic  sus- 
ceptibility was  illustrated  by  his  possession  of  three 
distinct  methods  of  delivery,  adjusted  to  the  three 
modes  of  self-expression  in  which  he  was  incompara- 
ble —  acting  a  character,  reciting  a  monolog,  and 
reading  a  lecture.  When  he  acted  a  character  he 
was  completely  and  wholly  the  comedian,  employ- 
ing accent  and  look  and  gesture.  When  he  recited 
a  monolog  —  and  it  was  very  largely  due  to  his 
practice  and  to  his  precept  that  the  monolog,  in 
prose  and  in  verse,  became  abidingly  popular  in 
Paris  —  he  ceased  to  be  an  actor;  he  abjured  ges- 
ticulation, he  spoke  quietly  as  became  a  gentleman 
in  evening  dress,  and  he  relied  mainly  on  the  mani- 
fold modulations  of  his  voice.  When  he  had  a 
lecture  to  deliver  he  was  simpler  still;  he  sat  in  his 
chair;  he  put  on  his  horn  spectacles;  and  he  did  not 
raise  his  voice  or  attempt  any  dramatic  variety  of 
intonation.  An  auditor  of  one  of  his  lectures  would 
never  have  had  occasion  to  suspect  that  the  reader 
was  also  the  most  versatile  and  the  most  accom- 
plished of  comedians. 


IV 

I  crossed  again  to  Europe  in  the  early  spring  of 
1902,  having  been  invited  to  deliver  three  lectures 
on  the  English  drama  at  the  Royal  Institution  in 
Albemarle  Street.  I  spoke  in  the  little  amphi- 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       429 

theater  in  which  Faraday  and  Tyndall  had  made 
some  of  their  most  memorable  addresses.  I  stood 
behind  the  long  desk,  so  to  call  it,  which  separated 
the  platform  from  the  rising  tiers  of  seats  for  the 
listeners,  and  which  was  fitted  with  the  proper  appli- 
ances for  the  performance  of  illustrative  experiments 
in  chemistry  and  physics. 

After  my  last  lecture,  one  of  my  friends  at  the 
Savile  expressed  his  regret  that  he  had  not  been 
able  to  hear  me,  as  his  own  engagements  were  likely 
to  hold  him  fast  on  Saturday  afternoons.  "In 
fact,"  he  went  on,  "the  last  time  I  was  able  to  go 
to  the  Royal  Institution  was  a  good  many  years 
ago  —  and  I  recall  the  occasion  because  I  saw  Tyn- 
dall do  a  very  curious  thing.  The  long  desk  was 
cluttered  with  apparatus  and  in  front  of  it,  in  the 
little  space  close  to  the  first  row  of  seats,  there  was 
a  table  with  a  stand  supporting  a  retort  filled  with 
a  dark  liquid,  under  which  a  Bunsen  burner  was 
lighted  just  before  Tyndall  came  out  to  begin  his 
vivacious  talk.  I  wondered  what  this  retort  was 
doing  out  there,  so  close  to  the  auditors;  and  my 
wonder  grew  as  Tyndall  went  on  and  on  without 
utilizing  it  or  mentioning  it.  Suddenly,  when  the 
hour  had  half  elapsed,  Tyndall  looked  up  with  a 
start  of  surprise,  as  tho  he  had  just  remembered 
that  retort,  whereupon  he  vaulted  lightly  over  the 
desk  and  turned  off  the  Bunsen  burner.  Then  he 
gave  a  sigh  of  relief  and  walked  slowly  around 
again  to  his  place  on  the  platform,  paying  no  atten- 
tion to  the  applause  of  the  spectators  of  his  athletic 
feat.  As  it  happened,  TyndalPs  assistant  was  an 


430  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

old  acquaintance  of  mine.  So  I  sought  him  out 
after  the  lecture  and  asked  him  if  the  lecturer  had 
really  saved  our  lives  by  his  startling  leap  over  the 
desk  to  prevent  the  explosion  of  the  retort.  He 
laughed  as  he  told  me  that  there  had  been  no  danger, 
since  the  extra  apparatus  on  that  table  had  been 
arranged  on  purpose  —  and  Tyndall  had  been  prac- 
tising that  vault  for  at  least  a  week !" 

During  this  visit  to  London  I  ceased  to  go  as  often 
to  the  Savile  as  I  had  been  in  the  habit  of  doing. 
The  reason  for  this  neglect  of  the  Savile  was  that  I 
had  been  elected  to  the  Athenaeum  in  the  spring  of 
1901.  It  was  at  Locker-Lampson's  request  that 
Matthew  Arnold  had  proposed  me  as  a  member  in 
1883;  and  the  waiting-list  was  then  so  full  that  I 
had  to  bide  my  turn  for  eighteen  years  before  my 
name  could  be  considered.  My  kindly  proposer 
had  died  in  the  interval,  and  Austin  Dobson  served 
as  my  sponsor.  There  were  already  several  Amer- 
ican members  of  the  Athenseum,  Henry  James,  for 
one,  but  they  were  all  settled  in  London;  and  I  am 
inclined  to  believe  that  I  was  the  first  non-resident 
American  to  be  elected. 

It  was  just  before  I  gave  my  last  lecture  at  the 
Royal  Institution  that  the  Boer  war  came  to  an 
end.  When  the  news  arrived  that  peace  had  at 
last  been  achieved,  the  streets  of  London  were  filled 
with  joyous  and  noisy  throngs,  almost  as  excited 
as  those  which  I  had  seen  in  Paris  on  the  day  of  the 
proclamation  of  the  republic.  It  was  to  celebrate 
the  happy  end  of  this  protracted  war  in  a  distant 
continent  that  King  Edward  decided  to  establish 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       431 

the  Order  of  Merit,  to  which  at  first  only  twelve  were 
appointed  —  three  generals,  Roberts,  Wolseley, 
Kitchener;  two  admirals,  Keppel  and  Seymour; 
four  scientists,  Rayleigh,  Kelvin,  Lister,  and  Hug- 
gins;  two  men  of  letters,  Morley  and  Lecky;  and 
one  painter,  Watts. 

As  it  happened,  most  of  the  appointees  to  the  new 
Order  belonged  also  to  the  Athenaeum;  and  in  recog- 
nition of  the  signal  honor  conferred  upon  these  mem- 
bers, the  club  departed  from  its  traditions  and  for 
the  first  time  in  its  fourscore  years  of  existence  it  re- 
solved to  give  a  dinner  to  the  Order  of  Merit.  Then 
it  was  that  I  found  myself  fortunate  in  having  been 
elected  to  the  Athenaeum  the  preceding  year;  and 
I  was  fortunate  again  in  being  favored  by  chance 
when  there  were  so  many  applicants  for  places  at 
the  tables  that  names  had  to  be  selected  by  lot. 
The  dinner  was  given  on  July  25,  and  it  was  at- 
tended by  ten  out  of  the  twelve  distinguished  men 
to  whom  it  was  given.  Lord  Avebury  (better 
known  to  most  of  us  as  Sir  John  Lubbock)  presided; 
and  speeches  were  made  by  Roberts  and  Kitchener, 
Rayleigh,  Kelvin,  Lister,  and  Huggins,  each  re- 
sponding to  the  toast  in  his  honor,  and  Admiral 
Seymour  spoke  for  himself  and  also  for  Admiral 
Keppel.  Arthur  Balfour  proposed  the  health  of 
the  chairman;  and  the  chairman  then  proposed  the 
health  of  Balfour,  whose  birthday  it  happened  to 
be.  The  speaking  was  perhaps  a  little  ponderous 
at  times,  and  I  recall  that  I  liked  least  of  all  Lister's 
somewhat  self-conscious  remarks,  and  that  I  relished 
most  the  straightforward  directness  of  the  brief  and 


432  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

soldierly  responses  of  Roberts  and  Kitchener.  As  I 
look  over  the  seating  plan  which  I  have  preserved  I 
see  that  E.  A.  Abbey  and  I  were  the  only  Americans 
present;  and  I  am  reminded  by  the  sight  of  Kip- 
ling's name  that  he  broke  off  a  chat  with  me  just 
before  dinner,  saying:  "I  must  go  and  find  some- 
body to  introduce  me  to  Kitchener !"  It  seemed  to 
me  odd  that  the  laureate  of  the  British  Empire 
should  not  earlier  have  met  the  general  who  had 
done  so  much  to  make  secure  the  borders  of  that 
wide-flung  realm. 

I  had  met  Kipling  first  at  the  Savile  in  the  sum- 
mer of  1891  when  he  had  recently  returned  from 
India,  and  when  he  was  in  the  first  flush  of  his  sudden 
success.  At  that  time  it  seemed  to  me  that  he  did 
not  feel  quite  at  home  in  England;  and  like  most  of 
the  men  who  have  spent  their  impressionable  years 
in  outlying  parts  of  the  empire,  he  found  it  easier 
to  be  friendly  with  an  American  than  with  the  aver- 
age inhabitant  of  the  British  Isles.  I  have  often 
observed  the  fact;  —  I  suppose  that  this  immediate 
fraternizing  is  due  to  our  possession  of  the  same 
language  and  of  the  same  traditions,  and  of  our  com- 
mon difficulty  in  narrowing  our  vision  to  the  affairs 
of  the  little  island  set  in  the  silver  sea.  To  the 
American  as  to  the  colonial,  London  may  be  "the 
power-house  of  the  race"  — but  it  is  not  the  whole 
works.  I  recall  that  in  1891  when  we  were  once 
talking  about  the  insularity  of  the  British,  Kipling 
said:  "Well,  I'm  not  an  Englishman,  you  know; 
I'm  a  colonial !"  a  statement  that  he  would  possibly 
not  have  repeated  a  score  of  years  later. 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       433 

Of  all  the  Englishmen  I  have  ever  known  Kipling 
has  the  most  sympathetic  understanding  of  American 
character.  He  married  an  American;  he  lived  for  a 
while  in  the  United  States;  and  his  intimate  ac- 
quaintance with  American  literature  began  when  he 
was  a  boy-journalist  in  India.  His  friendship  is  so 
thoro  that  he  has  not  hesitated  more  than  once  to 
point  out  certain  of  our  less  desirable  characteristics; 
and  this  has  sometimes  exposed  him  to  the  charge 
of  unfriendliness.  I  doubt  if  we  Americans  are 
fonder  of  flattery  or  more  resentful  of  candid  criti- 
cism than  the  British  are  or  the  French  or  the  Ger- 
mans; and  our  cuticle  is  not  as  tender  as  it  was 
before  the  civil  war;  but  even  now  we  are  not  as 
thick-skinned  as  we  might  be. 

Lovers  of  poetry  are  united  in  holding  that  its 
appeal  is  rather  to  the  ear  than  to  the  eye.  Even  if 
we  must  get  our  knowledge  from  the  printed  page, 
we  do  not  really  possess  a  poem  until  we  have  read 
it  aloud  and  made  ourselves  conscious  of  its  rhyth- 
mical potency.  As  this  is  the  case,  I  have  been  in- 
clined to  believe  that  those  lyrics  are  most  likely 
to  please  our  ears  which  have  been  composed  more 
or  less  completely  in  the  head  of  the  poet,  even  if 
they  may  have  been  meticulously  revised  after  he 
had  put  them  on  paper.  I  knew  that  Scott  had 
beaten  out  his  ballads  as  he  galloped  over  the  hills 
and  that  Tennyson  had  often  sung  his  songs  into 
being  while  walking  in  the  open  air.  I  was  confirmed 
in  this  belief  when  Kipling  dropped  into  my  house 
in  New  York  one  day  in  the  nineties  and  when  he 
answered  my  query  as  to  what  he  had  been  at  work 


434  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

on  with  the  information  that  he  had  just  completed 
a  long  ballad.  I  asked  to  see  it. 

"Oh,  I  can't  show  it  to  you  now,"  he  explained, 
"for  it  isn't  written  down  yet.  But  I've  got  it  all 
in  my  head  and  I'll  say  it  to  you  if  you  like." 

When  I  assured  him  that  this  was  exactly  to  my 
liking,  he  began  to  recite  '  McAndrew's  Hymn,' 
walking  up  and  down  as  he  spoke  the  vigorous  and 
sonorous  lines  of  that  superb  story  in  rime,  second 
in  Kipling's  own  verse  only  to  the  noble  'Ballad  of 
East  and  West,'  and  unsurpassed  in  the  work  of  any 
other  contemporary  ballad-writer  of  our  language. 
The  weighty  lines  and  the  picturesque  movement  of 
the  poem  lost  nothing  in  the  poet's  simple  delivery. 
When  he  had  made  an  end,  I  cried  out  my  admira- 
tion. And  then,  after  my  enthusiasm  had  cooled 
a  little,  I  hesitated  a  criticism. 

"Are  you  certain  sure  that  you  have  all  your 
engineering  technicalities  just  right?"  I  asked. 

"I  think  so,"  Kipling  replied.  "In  fact,  I'm  al- 
most sure.  But  I'm  going  to  Washington  next  week 
and  your  chief  engineer,  Melville,  has  promised  to 
point  out  any  slips  that  I  may  have  made." 


It  was  on  my  return  voyage  to  New  York  from 
one  of  these  summer  visits  to  Europe  that  I  had  on 
successive  nights  two  dreams  so  absurd  that  I  have 
remembered  them.  In  the  first,  I  had  descended 
into  hell,  which  I  found  to  be  a  vast  region  with  an 
iron  floor  and  with  an  iron  ceiling,  riveted  to  iron 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       435 

stanchions,  with  the  hexagonal  nuts  visible  —  just 
as  they  were  above  the  berth  in  which  I  was  sleeping. 
The  atmosphere  of  this  shallow  place  of  departed 
spirits  was  murky  with  smoke  and  there  was  only 
a  dim  light.  But  in  the  distance  I  saw  a  glare, 
toward  which  I  was  impelled  by  an  irresistible  im- 
pulse. As  I  came  closer  I  discovered  that  this  light 
proceeded  from  gas-jets,  which  I  soon  perceived  to 
be  arranged  to  form  flaming  letters,  flickering  and 
flaring  with  the  veering  of  the  wind.  When  at  last 
I  stood  only  a  few  yards  from  it,  there  fell  a  lull 
and  I  was  able  to  read  the  legend  written  in  letters 
of  fire.  There  were  only  four  words:  "Keep  off  the 
grass."  And  as  I  had  seen  this  vision  in  a  dream, 
the  oddity  of  it  did  not  strike  me  until  I  recalled 
it  on  waking  the  next  morning. 

In  the  second  of  these  curious  dreams,  a  little 
more  coherent  than  dreams  usually  are,  I  was  being 
taken  by  the  younger  Dumas  to  call  on  the  elder 
Dumas.  Of  course,  our  conversation  was  in  French; 
and  I  note  this  because  I  am  inclined  to  think  it 
very  unusual  for  a  man  to  dream  in  a  foreign  tongue. 
What  the  younger  Dumas  said  to  me  on  the  way, 
I  never  remembered,  nor  what  the  elder  Dumas  said 
when  I  was  presented  to  him.  What  alone  floated 
in  my  waking  memory  was  what  I  had  said  to  the 
man  I  had  come  to  visit:  "Your  son  is  a  man  of 
talent;  he  has  written  the  'Dame  aux  Camelias.' 
But  I  am  a  man  of  genius;  I  have  written  nothing  at 
all!" 

No  other  dream  of  mine  ever  equalled  the  tri- 
umphant quaintness  of  these  two.  As  a  schoolboy 


436  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

I  used  to  dream  that  I  had  the  gift  of  levitation,  that 
is  to  say,  of  floating  thru  the  air  over  the  heads 
of  my  companions.  I  believe,  however,  that  this 
illusion  is  not  uncommon  in  boyish  dreams;  and  I 
recall  how  I  regretted  in  my  waking  hours  that  I 
did  not  really  possess  this  faculty,  longing  to  be  able 
to  astonish  the  teachers  by  hovering  lightly  and 
lazily  over  their  heads. 

The  only  dream  at  all  comparable  in  its  comic 
unexpectedness  with  these  two  of  mine  was  one 
which  came  to  Elihu  Vedder  in  Capri.  He  dreamed 
that  an  American  lady,  also  settled  in  that  lovely 
island,  had  complained  to  him  of  the  difficulty  of 
washing  the  gardener's  dog  to  get  rid  of  the  ticks  in 
his  shaggy  hide.  To  this  Vedder  heard  himself 
replying  that  the  difficulty  was  natural  enough, 
since  the  gardener's  dog  was  a  watch-dog,  and  there- 
fore, of  course,  it  had  sixty  ticks  every  second ! 

And  since  I  quoted  this  pun  dreamed  by  an  im- 
aginative artist  in  Italy  I  am  led  to  quote  another 
pun  perpetrated  by  another  imaginative  artist  when 
he  was  thoroly  wide  awake.  On  one  of  our  voyages 
to  Europe  we  crossed  on  the  Celtic;  and  the  evening 
before  we  left  New  York,  Oliver  Herford  called  me 
up  on  the  telephone  to  bid  me  farewell.  He  asked 
me  the  name  of  the  ship  that  was  to  bear  us  away; 
and  some  imp  of  the  perverse  tempted  me  to  say  that 
we  were  going  over  on  the  Keltic. 

"Don't  say  that,"  was  Herford's  telephonic  re- 
sponse; "or  you  will  have  a  hard  C  all  the  way 
over!" 

I  quoted  this  once  to  a  Scotch  friend  who  capped 


LATER  EUROPEAN  MEMORIES       437 

it  with  this:  A  distinguished  English  scientist  of  the 
last  generation  did  not  reserve  all  his  imagination 
for  his  investigation  into  the  secrets  of  nature.  He 
utilized  some  of  it  to  invent  marvellous  chapters 
from  his  own  biography;  and  on  one  occasion  when 
he  had  spun  an  unusually  unbelievable  yarn  with 
himself  in  the  center  of  the  coil,  the  friend  to  whom 
he  had  made  this  extraordinary  confession,  looked 
him  in  the  eye  with  the  direct  question:  "Clifford, 
do  you  mean  to  tell  me  that  all  this  really  occurred 
to  you?" 

And  the  man  of  science  answered  with  a  swift 
smile:  "Yes;  it  just  occurred  to  me! " 


CHAPTER  XIX 

A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT 
I 

IN  preparation  for  the  writing  of  these  rambling 
recollections  of  a  life  now  stretching  out  toward 
the  allotted  threescore  years  and  ten,  I  have 
diligently  scanned  every  page  of  every  one  of  the 
series  of  little  diaries  in  which  for  forty  years  and 
more  I  have  summarily  jotted  down,  day  after  day, 
a  hasty  record  of  books  read,  plays  witnessed,  things 
done,  and  persons  seen.  I  have  never  had  the 
patient  application  demanded  by  the  more  ambi- 
tious journal,  with  its  attempt  to  preserve  in  minute 
detail  the  evanescent  impressions  of  the  moment, 
and  with  its  incessant  effort  to  retain  a  clear  echo 
of  the  clever  talk  that  might  otherwise  go  in  one 
ear  and  out  of  the  other.  But  I  have  been  able  to 
overcome  my  customary  inertia  once  in  every 
twenty-four  hours  and  to  fix  a  few  of  the  facts  of 
the  daily  routine  of  existence;  and  these  entries, 
stripped  of  all  color  and  all  movement,  implacably 
impersonal,  mere  inert  and  faded  and  truncated 
memorandums,  are  yet  possessed  of  the  power  to 
touch  forgotten  springs  and  to  evoke  swift  visions 
of  events  utterly  obliterated  from  all  remembrance. 
We  are  told  that  in  the  course  of  seven  years  the 
body  undergoes  a  complete  transformation  of  its 

438 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     439 

constituents;  and  we  cannot  doubt  that  the  mind 
also  makes  itself  over  and  not  only  rids  itself  of 
many  insignificant  things  that  it  has  been  carrying, 
but  also  changes  itself  more  or  less,  so  that  we  may 
not  easily  perceive  the  evolution  of  any  one  of  its 
later  stages  from  any  one  of  the  earlier.  As  I  res- 
olutely turned  leaf  after  leaf  of  the  oldest  of  these 
tiny  volumes,  I  found  myself  taken  back  across  the 
yawning  gulf  of  years  and  forced  to  gaze  into  the 
face  of  the  unformed  lad  I  was  when  I  started  to 
keep  track  of  my  daily  doings.  The  boy  is  father 
to  the  man,  beyond  all  question;  nevertheless,  this 
elderly  reader  did  not  readily  recognize  the  features 
of  his  juvenile  ancestor.  That  distant  progenitor 
seemed  to  him  a  very  different  person,  with  tastes 
that  he  had  almost  forgotten  and  with  experiences 
that  he  had  allowed  to  slip  blankly  into  oblivion. 

Of  course,  I  could  recall  my  changes  of  domicile 
and  the  successive  homes  we  had  occupied.  But  I 
found  entries  proving  that  men  had  come  to  my 
house  whose  names  mean  nothing  to  me  now  and 
whose  faces  I  cannot  call  up.  Other  entries  in- 
formed me  that  I  had  seen  plays  which  I  had  for- 
gotten totally  and  which  I  had  been  regretting  that 
I  had  never  seen  —  plays  of  Moliere,  for  example, 
the  performance  of  which  had  made  no  deposit  on 
my  memory,  in  spite  of  my  early  and  abiding  inter- 
est in  the  greatest  of  comic -dramatists.  And  there 
were  books  I  had  read,  the  titles  of  which  had  a 
strange  unfamiliarity,  even  tho  the  record  might 
reveal  also  the  departed  fact  that  I  had  reviewed 
them  once  upon  a  time.  On  the  other  hand,  there 


440  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

were  a  few  long-distant  happenings  which  had  kept 
their  color  and  their  movement  and  which  sprang 
back  to  life,  swift  and  sharp  in  outline  as  soon  as 
my  eyes  fell  upon  the  half-dozen  abbreviated  words 
of  the  contemporary  entry.  Memory  is  indeed  a 
frolicsome  sprite  who  delights  in  playing  pantomime 
tricks  upon  us;  and  sometimes  she  seems  to  be  a 
little  lacking  in  the  sense  of  values,  keeping  tight 
hold  of  many  things  that  are  worthless  and  letting 
slip  more  that  demand  insistently  to  be  retained. 

As  I  have  noted,  I  had  not  forgotten  our  successive 
migrations,  and  yet  I  have  failed  to  set  down  in  these 
pages  an  incident  connected  with  one  of  these  re- 
movals. When  Columbia  College  was  about  to 
depart  from  Madison  Avenue  and  Forty-ninth 
Street,  to  expand  itself  leisurely  in  its  newly  acquired 
property  on  Morningside  Heights,  we  sold  our  house 
on  Eighteenth  Street  between  Fourth  Avenue  and 
Irving  Place  and  bought  one  on  the  corner  of  West 
End  Avenue  and  Ninety -third  Street.  After  we 
were  settled  in  this  new  home,  we  chose  an  after- 
noon when  we  invited  our  friends  to  drop  in  for  a 
cup  of  tea.  The  house  bore  a  number  on  the  avenue, 
but  its  entrance  was  around  the  corner  on  the  side 
street;  and  naturally  enough  not  a  few  of  our 
visitors,  unfamiliar  with  our  abode,  rang  the  bell  of 
the  dwelling  next  to  ours  on  the  avenue,  to  the  in- 
creasing annoyance  of  the  Irish  maid  servant,  who 
was  continually  called  from  her  own  work  to  de- 
clare that  hers  was  not  the  door  of  our  residence. 
After  this  had  happened  perhaps  a  dozen  times, 
there  came  a  final  ring  and  a  final  inquiry  as  to 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     441 

whether  this  was  our  house.  By  this  time  her 
patience  was  quite  worn  out  and  she  answered 
petulantly:  "It's  next  door,  I  tell  ye  —  round  the 
corner  there.  I  should  think  ye'd  know  that  by 
this  time!" 


n 

It  was  in  this  house  in  West  End  Avenue  that  I 
received  one  morning,  in  the  first  week  of  January, 
1907,  a  letter  from  M.  Jules  Jusserand,  ambassador 
of  the  French  Republic  and  historian  of  English 
literature,  informing  me  that  I  had  been  decorated 
with  the  cross  of  the  Legion  of  Honor.  And  it  was 
in  this  house  a  few  months  earlier  that  the  meeting 
had  been  held  which  resulted  in  the  establishment  of 
the  Simplified  Spelling  Board,  the  first  solidly  sup- 
ported organization  to  undertake  the  formidable 
task  of  arousing  the  two  peoples  who  have  English 
for  their  mother  tongue  to  admit  the  necessity  of 
removing  the  more  obvious  anomalies  of  our  orthog- 
raphy, if  our  speech  is  to  be  made  fit  for  service  as 
a  world-language.  There  had  been  earlier  not  a  few 
sporadic  efforts  on  the  part  of  spelling-reform  associa- 
tions and  of  the  philological  societies  of  Great  Britain 
and  the  United  States,  but  these  had  accomplished 
little  or  nothing,  partly  because  the  appeal  they 
put  forth  was  a  little  too  academic,  and  partly  be- 
cause they  were  without  funds  sufficient  for  the  pro- 
longed propaganda  necessary  to  awaken  attention 
and  to  overcome  prejudice.  Andrew  Carnegie  had 
agreed  to  sustain  our  movement  for  three  years,  if 


442  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

we  could  secure  a  certain  number  of  pledges  of  sup- 
port from  men  of  prominence,  and  if  we  could  sub- 
mit a  plan  of  campaign  which  approved  itself  to  his 
shrewd  business  sense. 

At  the  gathering  at  my  house  we  outlined  our 
proposals,  and  when  these  were  laid  before  Mr.  Car- 
negie they  seemed  to  him  feasible.  We  who  had 
thus  joined  together  were  encouraged  to  add  to 
our  number  and  to  organize  formally  as  the  Simpli- 
fied Spelling  Board.  As  soon  as  we  ventured  out 
into  the  open  with  our  recommendations  for  making 
English  orthography  simpler  to  use  and  easier  to 
acquire  both  by  children  and  by  foreigners,  it  was 
made  a  matter  of  reproach  to  us  that  we  were  "a 
self-appointed  body"  —  a  reproach  which  would  lie 
also  against  every  public-spirited  organization  in 
every  English-speaking  community.  Whenever  a 
wrong  needs  to  be  righted  or  an  improvement  needs 
to  be  advocated,  it  is  customary  for  a  few  of  those 
most  ardently  interested  to  band  together  in  a  body 
to  accomplish  the  end  in  view.  This  is  what  the  anti- 
slavery  men  had  done,  the  civil-service  reformers, 
the  supporters  also  of  international  copyright,  the 
founders  of  the  Sanitary  Commission  and  of  the  Red 
Cross  Society.  It  is  the  habit  of  our  race  to  rely 
on  individual  initiative  and  on  voluntary  associa- 
tions, and  those  who  saw  fit  to  find  fault  with  us  for 
being  self-appointed,  thereby  disclosed  their  failure  to 
understand  one  of  the  distinguishing  characteristics 
of  our  stock. 

Yet  I  venture  to  think  that  the  membership  of  the 
Simplified  Spelling  Board  when  we  were  at  last 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     443 

ready  to  begin  the  work  of  enlightenment  and  of 
persuasion,  did  not  greatly  differ  from  that  which  a 
governmental  commission  would  have  had  if  it  had 
been  judiciously  selected.  Any  body  charged  with 
the  duty  of  suggesting  improvements  in  orthog- 
raphy ought  to  number  among  its  members,  first  of 
all  linguistic  scholars,  experts  in  the  history  of  the 
language;  second,  men  of  letters,  experts  in  the 
use  of  the  language;  and  third,  men  of  affairs,  repre- 
senting the  public  at  large  who  are  the  makers 
of  the  language.  The  Simplified  Spelling  Board 
enrolled  as  representatives  of  the  first  group  not 
only  professors  of  English  in  leading  universities 
but  also  the  editors  of  every  important  dictionary 
of  the  English  language  —  in  the  United  States 
Webster's,  the  Century,  and  the  Standard;  in  Great 
Britain  the  Oxford,  the  Etymological,  and  the 
Dialect.  As  representatives  of  the  second  group 
we  had  with  us  at  the  beginning  Mark  Twain, 
R.  W.  Gilder,  Andrew  D.  White,  T.  W.  Higginson, 
and  William  James,  and  we  have  since  enlisted  the 
assistance  of  John  Burroughs  and  G.  W.  Cable. 
The  representatives  of  the  third  group  included  pub- 
lishers, editors,  bank  presidents,  judges,  and  heads 
of  leading  universities.  After  a  year  as  chairman, 
I  withdrew  in  favor  of  Professor  Lounsbury  of  Yale, 
who  became  the  first  president  of  the  Board  —  to 
be  succeeded  in  time  by  Professor  Grandgent  of 
Harvard. 

We  called  ourselves  the  Simplified  Spelling  Board 
because  we  did  not  wish  to  be  confounded  with  the 
more  radical  advocates  of  "fonetic  reform,"  and 


444  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

because  we  expected  at  first  to  confine  our  efforts  to 
the  acceleration  of  that  process  of  simplification  by 
the  casting  out  of  needless  letters  which  had  given 
us  sun  instead  of  sunne,  and  economic  instead  of 
csconomicke —  a  proces3  constantly  observable  in 
the  history  of  the  language,  and  aided  by  Noah 
Webster  when  he  preferred  wagon  and  almanac  to 
the  waggon  and  almanack  still  acceptable  to  our 
kin  across  the  sea.  We  knew  we  were  enlisted  for 
a  long  campaign  and  we  began  by  asking  very  little. 
In  fact,  we  almost  adopted  as  a  motto  Sainte-Beuve's 
saying  that  "orthography  is  like  society;  it  will 
never  be  entirely  reformed,  but  we  can  at  least  make 
it  less  vicious."  We  wanted  first  of  all  to  disestab- 
lish the  superstition  that  English  spelling  had  been 
divinely  ordained,  and  that  there  was  a  final  stand- 
ard, to  tamper  with  which  was  high  treason  if  not 
sacrilege.  It  was  easy  for  us  to  show  that  there 
has  always  existed  room  for  the  right  of  private 
judgment.  Which  is  the  proper  orthography,  gipsy 
or  gypsy?  controller  or  comptroller?  checque  or  cheque 
or  check?  rhyme  or  ryme  or  rime?  Who  shall  de- 
cide when  dictionaries  disagree? 

We  took  advantage  of  these  accepted  variations, 
recorded  in  long  columns  at  the  back  of  most  Ameri- 
can dictionaries;  and  we  began  by  issuing  a  list  of 
three  hundred  words  already  spelled  in  two  or  more 
ways,  with  the  suggestion  that  there  would  be  ad- 
vantage in  always  using  the  shortest  and  simplest 
form.  In  this  first  list  we  did  not  insert  a  single 
simplification  of  our  own  invention;  and  yet  even 
in  this  modest  beginning  we  could  not  help  seeming 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     445 

to  be  radical  since  we  included  twelve  rather  start- 
ling simplifications  recommended  several  years  earlier 
by  the  National  Educational  Association.  Among 
these  were  tho  and  altho,  thoro  and  thoroly,  thru  and 
thruout.  There  was  no  doubt  that  some  of  these 
twelve  truncated  spellings  looked  very  strange  — 
more  especially  thru.  It  is  true  that  those  readers 
who  were  familiar  with  the  final  edition  of  Tennyson 
(a  devoted  spelling  reformer)  might  have  noted  that 
this  poet  always  insisted  on  tho9  and  altho9  and  that 
he  always  abbreviated  through  into  thro9,  which  is 
not  as  satisfactory  phonetically  as  thru.  It  was 
generally  assumed  that  the  Simplified  Spelling  Board 
was  responsible  for  thru,  which  was  held  up  to  scorn 
as  a  horrible  example  of  orthographic  mayhem.  I 
confess  that  at  first  I  myself  found  thru  a  little  diffi- 
cult to  swallow;  but  after  a  while  I  became  recon- 
ciled to  it;  in  fact  I  soon  discovered  that  there  was 
a  tactical  advantage  in  putting  forth  one  extreme 
and  violent  simplification  to  draw  the  enemy's  fire 
in  concentrated  volleys.  And  I  was  amused  to  see 
that  thru  began  promptly  to  win  the  favor  of  adver- 
tisers (those  masters  of  simple  English),  probably 
because  of  its  appealing  brevity. 

When  President  Roosevelt  became  a  member  of 
the  Board  and  issued  his  order  to  the  Public  Printer 
to  adopt  our  recommendations,  then  the  storm 
broke  and  the  air  was  filled  with  the  shrieks  of  the 
wounded  and  the  groans  of  the  dying.  As  a  natural 
result  of  the  shouting  and  the  tumult,  attention 
was  called  to  the  lamentable  condition  of  English 
orthography;  and  we  began  to  win  adherents  in 


446  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

increasing  numbers.  What  we  had  to  overcome 
was  ignorance  and  the  prejudice  that  is  born  of  igno- 
rance; and  our  weapon  was  therefore  not  argument 
but  information.  Our  bitterest  opponents  were 
often  men  of  letters;  and  we  had  to  devote  ourselves 
to  the  "gradual  diffusion  of  intelligence  among 
the  educated  classes,"  to  use  Lounsbury's  pertinent 
phrase. 

Lord  Morley  uttered  a  shrewd  warning  when  he 
asserted  that  "nearly  all  lovers  of  improvement  are 
apt,  in  the  heat  of  a  generous  enthusiasm,  to  forget 
that  if  all  the  world  were  ready  to  embrace  their 
cause,  their  improvement  could  hardly  be  needed." 
We  have  not  yet  won  over  all  the  world  to  embrace 
our  cause;  but  we  have  diffused  information.  The 
more  vociferous  of  our  earlier  opponents  have  now 
shrunk  into  comparative  silence,  as  tho  no  longer 
willing  to  expose  their  naked  prejudices  to  the  public 
gaze.  What  we  have  still  to  do  is  to  overcome  the 
mighty  force  of  inertia  and  to  arouse  the  uninter- 
ested from  their  lethargic  willingness  to  let  ill  enough 
alone  and  from  their  inveterate  unwillingness  to  be 
bothered  by  any  questioning  of  their  indurated 
habits.  On  the  whole  we  are  greatly  encouraged, 
since  our  progress  in  reaching  the  ear  of  the  average 
man  has  been  far  swifter  than  the  most  sanguine 
of  us  dared  to  hope  when  the  Simplified  Spelling 
Board  came  into  existence.  Many  of  those  who 
themselves  refuse  to  adopt  any  of  the  shorter  spell- 
ings advocated  by  us  are  yet  perfectly  willing  that 
their  children  shall  use  simpler  forms.  Our  main 
effort  is  now  directed  toward  teachers,  who  are  best 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     447 

aware  of  the  illogic  of  the  spelling-book  and  of  the 
pitiful  waste  of  time  caused  by  its  cumbrous  ab- 
surdities. If  we  can  only  get  at  the  young  while 
they  are  yet  plastic  we  have  reason  to  feel  confident 
that  the  next  generation  will  be  ready  for  a  revision 
of  English  orthography  far  more  radical  than  any 
we  dare  to  urge  to-day. 

Ill 

It  is  with  undeniable  gratification  that  I  can  look 
back  upon  the  labors  of  the  later  Simplified  Spelling 
Board  and  of  the  earlier  Copyright  League;  and 
it  is  a  privilege  for  me  to  believe  that  I  had  a  share, 
however  slight,  in  the  starting  of  these  useful  organ- 
izations and  in  their  long-continued  activities.  And 
I  can  take  pride  also  in  my  membership  in  two  other 
societies,  one  of  them  selected  out  of  the  other  and 
both  of  them  free  from  the  reproach  of  being  "self- 
appointed."  At  its  annual  meeting  in  1898  the 
American  Social  Science  Association  elected  one 
hundred  representatives  of  the  allied  arts  —  men  of 
letters,  painters,  sculptors,  architects,  and  com- 
posers —  to  constitute  a  National  Institute  of  Arts 
and  Letters;  and  as  I  chanced  to  be  one  of  those 
thus  chosen  I  was  enabled  to  take  part  in  the  organ- 
ization of  this  new  body  and  in  the  slow  expansion 
of  its  membership  to  two  hundred  and  fifty.  Our 
beginnings  were  modest;  and  our  earlier  meetings 
for  the  reading  and  discussion  of  papers  pertinent 
to  our  several  callings  were  only  sparsely  attended. 
Yet  the  National  Institute  gained  strength  year  by 


448  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

year,  until  at  last  in  1904  it  felt  itself  able  to  under- 
take what  had  been  a  chief  purpose  of  its  founders  — 
the  creation  (inside  the  Institute)  of  an  Academy 
which  should  band  together  and  bring  into  more 
intimate  association  the  senior  practitioners  of  the 
several  arts. 

As  I  had  nothing  to  do  with  the  method  whereby 
the  earliest  members  of  this  Academy  were  to  be 
chosen,  I  feel  free  to  express  the  opinion  that  it  was 
most  ingeniously  devised,  in  that  it  resulted  in  the 
selection  of  a  preliminary  group  of  men  whose  title 
to  be  thus  picked  out  was  beyond  dispute;  and  it 
achieved  the  further  purpose  of  relieving  every 
academician  from  any  suggestion  of  self -selection. 
The  National  Institute  decided  to  begin  by  choosing 
seven  of  its  members  to  form  the  nucleus  of  the 
future  Academy;  and  the  ballots  revealed  that  this 
duty  had  been  accomplished  with  inexpugnable 
judgment. 

The  seven  original  members  of  the  American 
Academy  of  Arts  and  Letters  were  Howells,  Saint- 
Gaudens,  Stedman,  La  Farge,  Mark  Twain,  John 
Hay,  and  Edward  MacDowell  —  a  sculptor,  a 
painter,  a  composer,  and  four  men  of  letters.  These 
seven  were  empowered  to  elect  eight  more;  and  the 
fifteen  were  to  add  five.  Then  the  twenty  thus 
chosen  were  to  select  another  ten,  making  thirty 
in  all,  whereupon  the  Academy  was  to  consider  it- 
self constituted  and  at  liberty  to  begin  an  inde- 
pendent life,  with  its  own  constitution  and  its  own 
officers,  and  with  the  right  not  only  to  fill  all  va- 
cancies but  also  to  raise  the  number  of  its  members 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     449 

whenever  it  might  see  fit.  And  I  may  note  that  in 
time  it  decided  to  enlarge  itself  to  fifty,  choosing  the 
additional  members  at  intervals  and  only  after  most 
careful  consideration.  It  also  kept  its  ranks  full  by 
electing  new  members  to  take  the  place  of  those 
removed  by  death;  and  thus  it  was  that  in  the  course 
of  time  I  was  promoted,  being  the  fifty-second 
member  elected  to  the  Academy. 

It  was  intended  always  to  keep  the  relation  of 
the  Academy  to  the  Institute  as  close  as  possible. 
The  Academy  was  a  senate,  elected  out  of  the  lower 
house,  and  retaining  membership  in  that  house.  To 
emphasize  and  to  make  evident  this  solidarity  of 
aim,  the  two  bodies  hold  annual  joint  sessions,  the 
first  in  Washington,  the  third  in  Philadelphia,  the 
fifth  in  Chicago,  and  the  seventh  in  Boston,  the  al- 
ternate meetings  always  taking  place  in  New  York. 
At  the  sixth  joint  session  in  New  York,  in  1914,  we 
were  honored  by  the  presence  of  M.  Brieux,  as  a 
special  delegate  of  the  French  Academy,  charged 
to  bring  us  its  fraternal  greetings  and  conveying 
also  a  letter  from  Poincare,  President  of  France 
and  member  of  the  French  Academy,  to  Woodrow 
Wilson,  President  of  the  United  States  and  member 
of  the  American  Academy. 

The  National  Institute  annually  awards  a  gold 
medal  (designed  by  one  of  its  members)  for  excellence 
in  one  of  the  arts,  each  of  these  taking  its  turn  in  a 
cycle  of  seven  years.  This  medal  was  voted  in  turn 
to  James  Ford  Rhodes  for  history,  to  Augustus 
Saint-Gaudens  for  sculpture,  and  to  James  Whit- 
comb  Riley  for  poetry.  As  I  had  been  elected  presi- 


450  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

dent  of  the  Institute  in  1912,  and  again  in  1913, 
I  had  the  privilege  of  presenting  this  prize  to  William 
R.  Mead  for  architecture  and  to  Augustus  Thomas 
for  drama.  It  has  since  been  given  to  John  S.  Sar- 
gent for  painting,  to  Howells  for  fiction,  and  to 
John  Burroughs  for  the  essay. 

IV 

It  is  one  of  the  pleasant  privileges  of  advancing 
years  to  look  back  and  compare  the  present  with 
the  immediate  past,  and  to  perceive  the  alterations, 
social  as  well  as  physical,  which  have  taken  place 
decade  after  decade.  At  times  some  of  these 
changes  in  national  temper  and  in  national  tendencies 
may  seem  to  an  aging  man  to  disclose  a  deteriora- 
tion in  the  taste  of  the  American  people;  but  to  a 
sexagenarian  who  haply  retains  a  little  of  the  spirit 
of  youth  most  of  them  approve  themselves.  It 
appears  to  me  that  the  organization  of  a  National 
Institute  of  Arts  and  Letters  and  the  ensuing  crea- 
tion of  an  Academy  would  not  have  been  possible 
in  the  United  States  in  the  mid-years  of  the  nine- 
teenth century.  Few  would  be  so  rash  as  to  main- 
tain that  any  of  the  arts  —  excepting  perhaps  the 
art  of  letters  —  flourished  in  America  before  the 
civil  war  or  that  we  awoke  to  an  appreciation  of  our 
own  artistic  bareness  until  the  centenary  exhibition 
of  1876. 

Then  it  was  that  an  enforced  comparison  with 
other  nations  revealed  to  us  our  pitiful  penury  and 
aroused  in  us  a  recognition  of  the  value  of  the  arts 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     451 

to  a  people  otherwise  as  idealistic  as  ours.  The 
results  of  this  awakening  were  abundantly  visible 
at  the  Columbian  exhibition,  held  only  seventeen 
years  later.  We  could  gage  the  progress  we  had 
made  when  we  set  over  against  the  haphazard 
planning  and  the  uninspired  building  at  Philadel- 
phia the  scientific  certainty  of  the  scheme  and  the 
artistic  fitness  of  the  architecture  at  Chicago.  The 
white  city  on  the  shore  of  Lake  Michigan  left  in  the 
memory  of  all  who  had  the  good  fortune  to  behold 
it  an  unforgettable  vision  of  power  and  grace  and 
charm.  It  is  perhaps  in  architecture  that  our 
artistic  advance  is  most  undeniable;  and  this  is 
natural  enough,  since  this  is  a  new  country  with 
constantly  expanding  needs  which  compel  us  to 
incessant  construction,  whereas  new  edifices  of  signal 
importance  are  relatively  infrequent  in  the  capitals 
of  Europe,  where  the  fortunate  inhabitants  have 
inherited  from  former  generations  most  of  their 
necessary  buildings.  As  a  direct  result  of  our  inde- 
fatigable enterprise  architecture  is  a  living  art  here 
in  the  United  States  and  its  practitioners  are  com- 
pelled to  a  resolute  grapple  with  problems  more  or 
less  peculiar  to  American  conditions  —  problems  for 
which  they  are  finding  solutions  increasingly  satis- 
factory. Our  public  buildings,  national  and  State 
and  municipal,  are  no  longer  uncouth  and  amor- 
phous, like  the  unspeakable  post-office  in  New 
York.  No  more  are  our  universities  to  be  housed 
in  fortuitously  unrelated  halls  in  a  conflicting  heter- 
ogeny  of  styles.  The  dignified  assembly  of  admirably 
adjusted  buildings  in  which  Columbia  has  sheltered 


452  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

itself  on  Morningside  Heights  is  only  one  illustration 
of  the  new  spirit  which  now  animates  the  American 
people. 

Perhaps  even  more  significant  is  the  beauty  which 
is  now  being  bestowed  upon  edifices  so  purely  utili- 
tarian as  banks,  office-buildings,  factories,  and  rail- 
road-stations. Not  only  are  the  new  terminals  in 
New  York,  in  Washington,  and  in  other  American 
cities  more  stately  and  more  sumptuous  than  those 
which  adorn  any  of  the  capitals  of  Europe,  but  they 
are  also  scrupulously  free  from  the  piebald  advertise- 
ments which  disfigure  the  terminals  in  most  foreign 
countries  —  even  in  France,  where  we  are  wont  to 
expect  the  final  refinement  of  good  taste.  This 
refusal  of  the  certain  and  ample  revenue  to  be 
derived  from  the  advertiser's  artful  aid  is  added 
evidence  that  the  dollar  is  not  nearly  so  almighty 
over  us  as  alien  critics  of  our  civilization  have  often 
asserted. 

No  less  significant  is  the  growing  custom  of  call- 
ing upon  the  mural  painter  and  the  sculptor  to  work 
in  alliance  with  the  architect,  in  accord  with  the 
noble  example  set  by  the  Chicago  exhibition.  Here 
again  we  find  ourselves  in  generous  rivalry  with 
France,  bland  mother  of  the  arts,  and  far  in  advance 
over  Germany  and  Great  Britain.  These  things 
may  be  taken  to  show  that  we  have  at  last  discovered 
that  art  is  worth  while;  and  they  show  this  even 
more  emphatically  than  the  superb  expansion  of 
the  many  museums  in  which  our  cities  are  now 
garnering  the  best  that  the  past  has  bequeathed 
to  us  and  the  most  beautiful  that  the  present  is 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     453 

creating.  There  is  individuality  also  in  our  stained 
glass,  in  our  pottery  and  favrile  glass,  in  our  book- 
binding and  in  our  wrought  iron.  In  these  ancillary 
arts  we  cannot  fail  to  see  something  of  the  same 
vitality  which  is  exuberant  in  architecture.  In- 
deed, it  is  this  sense  of  fresh  endeavor  and  of  inge- 
nious experimentation  which  is  most  encouraging. 
This  vitality  of  the  various  arts,  major  and  minor, 
moved  an  English  decorator,  resident  in  the  United 
States,  to  confess  to  me  once  that  so  long  as  he 
could  not  be  a  contemporary  of  Phidias  in  Athens 
or  of  Raphael  in  Rome,  he  was  glad  to  be  living 
in  New  York  at  the  end  of  the  nineteenth  century. 


In  this  outflowering  of  the  arts  here  in  America 
in  the  final  decades  of  the  nineteenth  century  and 
in  the  opening  decades  of  the  twentieth,  there  is  no 
wilful  effort  for  a  new  departure,  no  denial  of  the 
traditions  of  the  past,  no  freakish  insistence  on 
being  novel  at  any  cost.  Rather  is  there  a  full 
recognition  of  the  fact  that  altho  this  may  be  a  new 
country  its  population  is  truly  the  heir  of  the  ages, 
privileged  to  profit  by  the  best  that  has  been  achieved 
in  other  lands  and  in  other  days.  Yet  in  the  evi- 
dences of  our  artistic  advance  there  is  also,  or  so  at 
least  it  seems  to  me,  a  note  of  our  own,  audi- 
ble enough,  even  if  difficult  to  define  with  precision. 
Especially  significant  is  the  comparatively  recent 
disappearance  of  colonialism,  of  that  servile  def- 


454  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

erence  to  the  mother  country,  which  was  so  obvi- 
ous in  our  attitude  a  century  ago. 

Even  in  literature  we  are  far  less  dependent  on 
Great  Britain  than  we  were  before  the  passage  of 
the  International  Copyright  act  removed  the  pre- 
mium of  cheapness  which  tended  to  force  second-rate 
British  fiction  into  an  exaggerated  circulation  in 
the  United  States.  The  literature  of  the  English 
language  is  still  what  it  always  has  been  and  what 
it  always  will  be,  one  and  indivisible;  and  even  if 
the  British  branch  of  it  may  be  more  important 
than  the  American  branch,  our  native  authors  are 
now  dealing  directly  with  our  own  life  and  are  en- 
gaged in  revealing  us  to  ourselves.  Essential  Ameri- 
canism, the  imaginative  energy  of  the  people,  may 
not  yet  have  expressed  itself  in  books,  in  prose  or 
in  poetry,  in  fiction  or  in  the  drama,  as  amply  as 
in  more  material  things,  in  our  inventions,  in  the 
best  of  our  superb  bridges,  for  example,  in  our  noble 
railroad-stations,  and  in  our  public  parks.  Yet  we 
have  no  real  reason  to  be  dissatisfied  with  our  con- 
tribution to  the  literature  of  the  language,  since  it  has 
recorded  not  inadequately  our  aspirations  and  our 
strivings,  and  since  at  least  half-a-dozen  of  our  au- 
thors have  succeeded  in  winning  a  reputation  in  in- 
ternational competition  outside  the  confines  of  the 
English  language. 

In  no  one  of  the  allied  arts  is  the  improvement 
more  obvious  to  any  one  whose  memory  goes  back 
for  half-a-century  than  in  the  drama  —  even  if  this 
assertion  must  not  be  taken  to  imply  that  we  have 
now  an  abundance  of  native  plays  as  veracious  and 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     455 

as  robust  as  we  could  desire.  We  may  be  without 
a  group  of  dramatists  able  to  withstand  comparison 
with  the  best  of  those  who  continue  to  maintain  the 
primacy  of  the  French  in  the  field  of  play-making. 
The  average  American  play  may  be  none  too  good 
to-day  —  indeed,  I  can  recall  no  period  in  all  the 
long  history  of  the  drama  when  the  average  play 
was  even  tolerably  good  —  but  in  the  middle  years 
of  the  nineteenth  century  the  average  American  play 
was  pitiably  feeble,  fumbling  in  craftsmanship, 
empty  of  purpose,  and  devoid  of  sincerity.  Further- 
more, it  was  then  likely  to  be  deadly  dull  —  dull 
beyond  any  experience  possible  to-day;  and  a  comic 
paper  of  that  departed  epoch  once  expressed  a  well- 
founded  dread  when  it  represented  a  dramatic  critic 
after  dinner  ordering  a  second  cup  of  coffee  and 
saying:  "Make  it  strong  —  for  I'm  going  to  see  an 
American  play  to-night,  and  I  must  keep  awake 
somehow!" 

Thin  and  weak  as  American  plays  were  then, 
they  were  only  a  little  thinner  and  a  little  weaker 
than  the  British  plays  of  the  same  period.  The 
main  reliance  of  the  London  managers  was  upon 
slovenly  adaptations  from  the  French,  in  which  con- 
tinental plots  were  distorted  into  external  con- 
formity with  insular  social  conventions;  and  these 
misleading  transmogrifications  of  Parisian  pieces 
were  freely  imported  by  our  managers,  under  the 
lead  of  Lester  Wallack.  If  these  plays  were  hope- 
lessly insincere  as  pictures  of  life  in  London,  they 
seemed  even  more  absurdly  fantastic  when  per- 
formed in  New  York.  From  1825  to  1875  the 


456  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

English-speaking  stage  was  a  realm  of  unreality  on 
both  sides  of  the  Atlantic.  At  last  the  right  of  the 
alien  author  to  control  his  own  work  began  to  be 
recognized  by  law  both  in  Great  Britain  and  in  the 
United  States;  and  as  a  result  the  best  foreign 
plays  were  thereafter  presented  in  translation,  re- 
taining their  full  local  color  and  their  original  ve- 
racity. Then  the  playwrights  of  our  own  language, 
relieved  from  unfair  competition  with  the  venders  of 
stolen  goods,  speedily  multiplied  in  number  and 
sought  to  deal  honestly  with  the  conditions  of  life  in 
their  own  communities.  In  time  plays  originally 
written  in  English  were  actually  exported;  Bronson 
Howard's  'Saratoga,'  which  had  been  successful  in 
London  in  a  British  adaptation  called  'Brighton,' 
was  performed  in  Berlin;  Gillette's  'Secret  Service' 
was  presented  in  France,  and  Clyde  Fitch's  'Truth' 
in  Italy  and  in  Germany.  To-day  a  piece  which 
has  pleased  in  New  York  is  almost  as  likely  to  be 
taken  to  London  as  a  piece  which  has  pleased  in 
London  is  likely  to  be  taken  to  New  York. 

This  exporting  of  American  plays  to  the  mother 
country  is  not  yet  quite  so  frequent  as  the  importa- 
tion of  British  plays  to  America,  partly  because  the 
old  colonial  habit  of  deference  to  the  mother  country 
still  survives  altho  diminished  in  strength;  and 
partly  because  we  have  developed  here  in  the  United 
States  only  one  or  two  dramatists  able  to  hold  their 
own  in  rivalry  with  the  foremost  of  the  contemporary 
dramatists  of  Great  Britain.  Perhaps  it  is  proper 
also  to  suggest  a  third  reason,  which  is  that  the  Ameri- 
can play  going  public,  compounded  of  many  simples, 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     457 

is  cosmopolitan  in  its  tastes  and  eager  to  welcome 
the  best  which  can  be  borrowed  from  any  other 
country,  whereas  the  British  are  still  more  or  less 
insular  in  their  likings  with  a  persevering  preference 
for  the  plays  which  at  least  pretend  to  mirror  their 
own  manners  and  customs. 

The  more  accurately  and  more  intimately  an 
author  deals  with  the  social  organization  of  his  own 
people  and  of  his  own  epoch,  the  more  searchingly  he 
presents  the  special  problems  which  his  country- 
men are  facing,  the  less  likely  is  his  play  to  win  the 
approval  of  the  friendly  alien  not  necessarily  inter- 
ested in  these  local  questions.  No  illustration  of 
this  could  be  more  significant  than  the  fact  that  the 
finest  comedy  of  the  nineteenth  century,  the  '  Gendre 
de  M.  Poirier'  of  Augier  and  Sandeau,  has  never 
achieved  any  permanent  popularity  outside  of  its 
native  language;  it  is  too  intensely  French  in  its 
atmosphere  to  be  widely  interesting  or  even  to 
be  adequately  understood,  beyond  the  borders  of 
France  itself.  Now,  as  it  happens,  one  of  the  most 
hopeful  signs  of  a  genuine  dramatic  growth  here  in 
the  United  States  is  that  the  more  promising  of  the 
younger  American  playwrights  are  seeking  to  set 
on  the  stage  the  life  that  seethes  about  them,  clamor- 
ing for  interpretation.  The  'Dame  aux  Camelias' 
and  the  "Second  Mrs.  Tanqueray,'  'Magda'  and 
'Truth,'  have  heroines  whose  appeal  is  to  the  emo- 
tions common  to  all  of  us  who  are  more  or  less 
sophisticated  by  occidental  civilization,  whereas 
pieces  like  'Alabama/  the  'Warrens  of  Virginia,' 
and  even  'Shore  Acres,'  relying  for  their  power  to 


460  THESE   MANY  YEARS 

My  record  of  books  read  in  the  years  that  are 
gone  drew  my  attention  to  the  pitiable  fading  away 
of  the  reputations  of  novelists  popular  enough  in 
those  distant  days.  It  is  only  two  or  three  decades 
since  the  editors  of  widely  circulated  periodicals 
in  London  and  in  New  York  were  glad  to  welcome 
to  their  pages  the  innocuous  tho  artificial  traveller's 
tales  of  William  Black;  and  to-day  when  I  chance 
to  cite  the  name  of  the  author  of  the  'Strange  Ad- 
ventures of  a  Phaeton'  to  young  men  of  literary  taste 
and  of  literary  aspiration  I  evoke  only  the  blank 
stare  of  ignorance.  The  generation  now  coming 
forward  knows  nought  of  Black;  and  it  cares  as  little 
for  Walter  Besant,  whose  cheerful  stories  used  to 
fellowship  with  Black's,  month  after  month,  and 
week  after  week.  Time  was  when  the  serial  enigmas 
of  Wilkie  Collins  kept  us  guessing  and  when  the 
alluring  but  lurid  unveracities  of  Ouida  kept  us 
sleepless.  Time  was,  time  is,  and  time  will  be;  and 
the  writers  of  "best  sellers"  have  their  fates,  like 
other  men.  Where  are  the  novels  of  yesteryear? 
In  what  dim  limbo  of  deserted  circulating  libraries 
do  they  now  repose  unmolested,  with  the  dust  thick- 
ening upon  their  heads? 

All  the  ancient  shrines  are  not  deserted  to-day 
nor  are  all  the  idols  abandoned  to  solitary  neglect. 
In  the  catalogs  that  settle  down  on  my  library- 
table  like  autumn  leaves,  I  discover  that  hopeful 
venders  are  proffering  complete  sets  of  Marryat, 
of  Lever,  and  of  Charles  Reade.  But  all  true  book- 
lovers  know  that  complete  sets  are  for  external  use 
only;  they  are  cenotaphs  into  which  their  owners 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     461 

rarely  penetrate;  and  they  stand  erect  with  all  the 
stately  chill  of  a  mausoleum.  Even  the  most  self- 
satisfied  of  authors  can  have  no  hope  of  carrying 
his  complete  works  down  with  him  to  posterity; 
that  narrow  trail  has  no  room  for  a  baggage- wagon; 
and  he  is  lucky  if  he  may  bear  along  the  salvage  that 
he  can  stow  away  in  the  saddle-bag.  Indeed  he  has 
no  reason  to  be  dissatisfied  if  the  wallet  of  time  is 
thinly  laden  with  but  a  single  volume  if  only  that 
one  book  is  as  eternally  captivating  as  'Robinson 
Crusoe.' 

"And  the  moral  of  that  is"  that  the  popular  story- 
tellers of  to-day,  the  best  sellers  of  the  second  dec- 
ade of  the  twentieth  century,  must  be  prepared  for 
the  same  sad  fate.  A  reputation  may  rise  steadily 
during  a  writer's  lifetime  and  swiftly  after  his  death 
when  his  contemporaries  become  unexpectedly  con- 
scious of  their  loss;  and  then  it  is  certain  to  decline 
in  the  ensuing  years,  even  if  it  may  recover  itself 
after  time  has  winnowed  the  works  that  supported 
it,  and  selected  from  out  of  the  mass  the  two  or 
three  masterpieces  best  fitted  to  buttress  a  departed 
celebrity.  It  may  be  doubted  whether  George  Eliot 
is  not  now  being  weighed  in  the  balance  of  posterity 
with  no  certainty  that  she  will  preserve  her  lofty 
position  as  the  third  in  the  triumvirate  with  Dickens 
and  Thackeray.  Sidney  Lanier's  series  of  lectures 
on  the  'English  Novel,'  in  which  he  held  all  her  great 
predecessors  to  be  merely  trail-breakers,  existing  only 
to  make  smooth  her  triumphant  arrival,  seems  to 
some  of  us  to-day  sadly  one-sided,  altho  less  than 
twoscore  years  have  elapsed  since  its  publication. 


462  THESE  MANY  YEARS 

Yet  if  George  Eliot  of  the  masculine  mind  is  in  a 
perilous  predicament,  we  may  be  assured  that  the 
gulf  of  oblivion  is  yawning  grimly  before  the  feet 
of  most  of  those  whose  popularity  to-day  is  less 
solidly  established  than  was  hers  in  her  own  genera- 
tion. 


VII 

At  last  I  come  to  the  end  of  my  agreeable  task  of 
celebrating  myself  and  of  talking  about  myself  to 
my  heart's  content.  There  are  many  other  recollec- 
tions that  I  could  have  dwelt  upon  and  that  I  have 
decided  to  omit  from  these  pages.  I  have  chosen 
to  set  down  here  only  the  pleasanter  memories  of 
my  journey  thru  life;  and  it  has  seemed  wisest  for 
me  to  pass  over  those  that  were  not  so  pleasant,  and 
not  even  to  hint  at  those  which  were  bitter.  Our 
joys  we  share  with  acquaintances  of  the  moment, 
but  our  sorrows  are  rarely  to  be  confided  even  to 
friends  of  long  standing;  they  are  for  ourselves  alone, 
and  we  must  bear  them  as  best  we  can.  Many  joys 
have  been  mine,  even  if  they  were  never  violent; 
and  my  sorrows  have  been  fewer  than  fall  to  the  lot 
of  most  men.  As  it  has  been  my  good  fortune  to 
find  myself  "a  man  of  cheerful  yesterdays  and  of 
confident  to-morrows,"  it  has  been  less  difficult 
for  me  than  for  many  another  to  take  the  world 
for  what  it  was  and  to  make  the  best  of  things  such 
as  they  are. 

If  there  is  any  truth  in  the  cynical  saying  that  a 
pessimist  is  a  man  who  has  just  come  from  a  long 


A  SEXAGENARIAN  RETROSPECT     463 

conversation  with  an  optimist,  then  I  can  only 
fear  that  the  readers  of  this  record  had  better  be- 
gin at  once  to  pray  for  deliverance  from  the  pangs  of 
pessimism.  I  am  drawing  to  the  end  of  my  days  in 
a  position  very  different  from  that  in  which  I  stood 
when  I  attained  to  man's  estate;  and  few  things 
would  have  more  astonished  me  than  if  I  could  have 
foreseen  then  where  I  should  be  now.  No  doubt 
it  was  lucky  for  me  that  I  could  have  no  prophetic 
vision  of  my  future  situation;  and  no  doubt  again 
it  is  lucky  for  me  that  I  was  born  contented  as  well 
as  cheerful.  No  one  has  any  reason  to  be  discon- 
tented who  finds  himself  as  I  do,  engaged  in  work 
that  he  enjoys,  in  congenial  surroundings  with  con- 
genial associates  —  work  for  which  he  is  fairly  well 
paid  and  with  the  result  of  which  he  is  not  altogether 
dissatisfied. 


THE  UNIVERSITY  LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA,  SANTA  CRUZ 

This  book  is  due  on  the  last  DATE  stamped  below. 


OCT3CT85 

OCT  3  0  1985  JEfi'8 


50m-6,'67(H2523s8)2373 


3  2106  00207  63" 


